


Basilisk in the Grass

by ckret2



Series: Pentious Week [2]
Category: Hazbin Hotel (Web Series)
Genre: Backstory, Body Dysphoria, Canonical Character Death, Dubious Morality, F/M, Gilded Age, Human Sir Pentious (Hazbin Hotel), Imperialism, Moral Bankruptcy, Period Typical Attitudes, Period Typical Bigotry, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Transphobia, Shotgun Wedding, Trans Male Character, Trans Sir Pentious (Hazbin Hotel), Victorian, Victorian Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:15:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25581952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ckret2/pseuds/ckret2
Summary: The birth, rise, fall, and death of history's first and worst super villain: the mysterious, megalomaniacal machine-maker Sir Pentious.As witnessed through the lens of a crumbling marriage.
Relationships: Sir Pentious (Hazbin Hotel)/Original Character(s)
Series: Pentious Week [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1852252
Comments: 25
Kudos: 79





	1. Birth

**Author's Note:**

> This is for [Pentious Week](https://twitter.com/Gh0sTiE_doodles/status/1275233770136899585?s=20) on twitter! Day 2 of 7: "Lovestruck". I decided to string days 2, 3, 4 and 5 together into a single fic because, like, they line up with the backstory fic I've been trying to write since December or January, so why not.
> 
> I go by the headcanon that Sir Pentious is a trans man which is obviously gonna be extremely relevant to his human backstory so okay let's talk about gender!! First: for part of this chapter Sir Pent is gonna be going by his dead name and female pronouns because, at that point in the fic, he hasn't started thinking of himself as "himself" yet. Pronoun usage is based on viewpoint character's self-perception. So like, don't panic, it'll go away. (And quickly. I know for most folks the mental figuring-out-you're-trans process is slower, but for him I see him as oblivious for years and years as the evidence internally mounted until the epiphany hit him all at once.)
> 
> Second: the modern category box known as "trans" hadn't yet been created in the Victorian era, so Victorian trans folks fit themselves into what category boxes they could find. (One of the boxes that existed at the time, which Sir Pent references in the fic, is the idea of "female husbands"—some of whom might have been super butch lesbians crossdressing as men and some of whom might have been trans men; but in their own time period, they were all grouped together and likely would have seen themselves as part of the same group despite different internal senses of gender.) So, even in the moment Sir Pent realizes he's trans, he doesn't really Realize He's Trans, so he's gonna see himself somewhere between "man" and "woman disguised as man." I'm trying to maintain a balance between a modern understanding of transness and how I think a character who predated the concept would understand himself based on his society's culture.
> 
> Okay that's it on with the fic! It's very rushed because, uh... I wrote it all in one day. Proofing will come later, fleshing out bits I feel are rushed might come even later. Because I'm trying to write his entire backstory in four days, it's gonna end up sort of the Reader's Digest edition of Sir Pentious's biography. What's important is it hits the juicy bits. Anyway enjoy!

"Yes, that's right. Of the Grace family." He half-whispered the words toward the mirror as he dressed, practicing for a hundred hypothetical future conversations. "No—no, not the French Graces, the _British_ ones. Hm? You've heard of us? Ah—yes, he was my father. Yes, 'was.' Oh—you haven't heard about the fire? Terrible tragedy—yes, I miss them dearly—no, I was in London at the time..."

He unwrapped and rewrapped the shredded fabric of what had once been his dress for the third time; any tighter and it was hard to breathe, any looser and it didn't flatten his chest enough. For the hundredth time this month, _thank God_ he'd gotten his aunt's breasts instead of his mother's; but couldn't they have been a little smaller still?

"No, not Gilbert Grace—he was my brother." He buttoned his father's shirt as he spoke—Helena had done a wonderful job hastily tailoring it so that he didn't look like a ten-year-old playing dress-up. He cast a look at the top hat waiting next to the sink, his work goggles wrapped around the band, as he said, "Yes, I think I miss my brother the most."

Once he'd established himself in America maybe he could let his hair back down without drawing any looks—who was going to question an eccentric millionaire inventor?—but since he _wasn't_ fabulously wealthy and spectacularly infamous, he wound his hair into a quick bun before settling the top hat over it.

"Yes, I did have a sister," he said, leaning in close to the mirror as he attempted to do his tie. "Lost in the fire too, I'm afraid. Of course, I miss her terribly. No, I'm not surprised you didn't know he had a second son; I'm the youngest, he hadn't brought me in on the family business yet. Oh, don't act so surprised, let's not pretend we don't both know I sound like I'm fourteen! My poor luck, isn't it?" On the fifth attempt, he managed to get his tie right.

"But I've been providing blueprints to the company for, oh, a few years now—I'm something of an engineering prodigy—I expect to be far more involved in the design process than my father was—" He cut himself off, as though somebody had interrupted him. "Oh, have I not introduced myself yet? It's Basil. Basil Grace. Short for Basilisk. Like the serpent. From Greek myth?" Grinning broadly, he made eye contact with his top hat's goggles and winked. "Maybe let's not mention that part; it could raise a few too many eyebrows, don't you think?" He chuckled as he pulled on his waistcoat. " _We'll_ know what it's short for. Basilisk Grace." He dragged the whisper out into a hiss, relishing the sound of his new name: _Basssilisssk Graccce._

Basil buttoned the waistcoat and continued his one-sided dialogue with the mirror: "I appreciate your sympathies, but I'm here about your outstanding account with Grace Steel & Firearms," he said. "I heard your side lost. Terribly sorry—you know, we were rooting for you in England—but! That doesn't change the fact that you purchased _quite_ a few firearms from us, and losing the war doesn't... change..."

He trailed off thoughtfully, frowning to himself in the mirror. Then he opened the bathroom door and leaned into the hotel bedroom. "Helena, are we starting off in the north or the south?"

"New York is in the—" She cut off with a frown herself, rummaged through their papers for a map, and checked. "North."

"Thank you, love." He leaned back into the bathroom and started over: "I hear your side _won._ We were all ecstatic to hear the news—you know, we were rooting for you in England—and I do hope you'll remember the contribution my family's business made to that victory, hmm? Contributions that we're still owed for—"

"Are you practicing conversations again?" Helena called.

"I want to get them right! We can't make a single mistake! Imagine if we're caught. I don't even know how they'll react in the States."

"You don't sound as nervous at the prospect as I think you should," Helena said, coming over to the door, smoothing her hands nervously over the front of her dress.

"I'm _not_. I'm excited." He leaned out of the door, beaming so widely at Helena it made his eyes crinkle. "Because we're not _going_ to be caught. Look. Come on." He offered her his hand and gently tugged her into the bathroom to stand next to him in front of the mirror, the two of them framed in the glass as though they were looking at a painted portrait. "Before you stands the brilliant young heir to the Grace family and his dazzling, darling new wife, soon to be mother to his child." He laced the fingers of one hand together with the hand she had over her womb, and wrapped his other arm around her waist. "Nobody will question us! Who would question the manhood of a man who's fathered a child?" He nuzzled aside her brass-blond tresses to kiss her cheek.

Helena leaned into the touch, but whispered, "What if the baby doesn't look like either of us? What if it looks too much like...?"

"We'll say it takes after one of its grandparents," Basil whispered back. "Nobody knows what yours look like."

Helena let our a long, shaky sigh, then nodded.

"All right?"

"All right."

"Great." He stepped back from her, arms spread wide, and asked, "How do I look? Like a proper gentleman?"

Helena eyed him critically, gaze slowly roving up and down, taking in Basil's top hat, the width of his shoulders, the way his waistcoat fit around his chest and his pants hung from his hips. After a long moment of consideration, she said, "All but the thighs."

His shoulders slumped and his hands dropped. "Damn my thighs," he muttered.

Helena gasped and laughed simultaneously, her hand flying to her mouth. "B—Basil!"

"I'm serious," he said, turning to the mirror and tugging at the sides of his waistcoat in the hopes that fluffing it out wider would balance out his hips. "My thighs can go to hell."

"Don't say that!" Helena giggled. "You're attached to your thighs, you'd go with them."

He thought of the wild light of the fire that had devoured his childhood home alive. He thought he was probably going anyway.

He found that the thought didn't bother him as much as it should. "I suspect the company is more interesting down there."

He pulled on his coat, held out his arm to Helena; and together, they left to catch their boat to America.

###

Queen Victoria loved serpentine jewelry.

Snakes were associated with love, with life, with wisdom. Throughout her reign, bright enamel bangles and heart-pendant necklaces and double coiled rings were all formed in the shape of snakes—studded with rubies, diamonds, and turquoise—were all the rage among English citizens wealthy enough to collect them. Queen Victoria's own engagement ring was in the shape of a coiled serpent. She received it in 1839. In 1840, she was wed.

That same year, the infant who would someday come to be known as Sir Pentious was born on the Grace estate, into a world of golden jewel-encrusted serpents. In the spirit of the heightened patriotism inspired by Her Majesty's recent wedding, Sir Grace and Lady Grace christened their newborn daughter Brittania.

They would only get away with calling her that until she got old enough to start objecting.

###

Two weeks before boarding the boat to America, Brittania hissed in the dark, "Run away with me."

Helena's teary red eyes widened. " _What?_ You can't be serious, Brit!"

"It's like you don't know me," Brit scolded. She seized one of Helena's cold hands and hiked up her own skirt to use the hem as a handkerchief on Helena's face. She was already out before dawn sitting in the damp grass with her legs crossed in a coat and boots she'd stolen from her brother's room, she wasn't about to get in any more trouble for flipping her skirt up around a woman she'd known since they were five years old. "Haven't I been threatening to run away with you for half our lives."

"Usually on a pirate ship."

Solemnly, Brit said, "And had there been any pirate ships this far inland when we were twelve, I would have made us into a fine pair of stowaways."

Helena laughed. Brit insisted, "I'm _serious_ ," and Helena laughed harder, a couple more tears squeezing out around her nervous giggles.

At least she was smiling again. Brit lifted Helena's hand up to Brit's face and kissed the knuckles. More quietly, she repeated, "I'm serious. Run away with me."

That stopped Helena's laughter. "You have the most noble soul I've ever seen," she said, squeezing Bret's hand. "But what good is that going to do us? How far could a couple of women without husbands possibly get—especially if one of them..." Her face fell again as she pressed her free hand over her stomach.

Which brought them back to the problem.

Brit had been woken out of a dead sleep at half past three o'-what-in-God's-name-clock in the morning by stones rattling her window, to find Helena had sprinted in the dead of night from her home in the nearby town to stand shivering on the grounds of the Grace estate. When Brit had managed to approximately get dressed and they'd made it far enough from the estate that Helena had felt safe to sob freely, she'd shared the whole sorry tale:

A couple of months, she'd had a brief... association with one of the traveling actors who'd come through the town to put on that play. Brit knew how badly she'd wanted to be an actress, how badly she wanted to get away from this town—in fact, she'd very nearly decided to run away with the acting troupe ("Without me?" Brit had asked indignantly), but in the end all that had come from it was a brief romance.

And a child.

"What are your other options?" Brit asked.

Helena took a deep, shaky breath. "Marry _John_." John was her most persistent suitor, and Helena's mother had been pressuring her to settle down with him already, considering that she'd run off every other eligible bachelor in town and was making no efforts to seek them elsewhere. "If he's willing to raise a... another man's child—"

"Terrible option. What else?"

"Track down the acting troupe and marry the real father." Helena laughed miserably. "Which would take a miracle."

"We'll find them on that pirate ship of mine." What's option three?"

"Give up the child and move to a nunnery." She curled her fingers tightly in the front of her dress. The child was barely large enough to form a bulge in her belly, but despite how much she feared it, she'd made abundantly clear that she already loved it so fiercely that Brit almost found herself beginning to love it, too. Helena had been fantasizing to Brit about having children since she was seventeen, even though her fantasies had never contained a husband who could provide her with one. She'd gotten her wish after all, hadn't she?

"That's no option at all. Fourth?"

"Prostitution. And that's it."

"Terrible list. Option five: run away with me."

"And then we _both_ have to turn to prostitution if we don't want to starve to death? What kind of an improvement is that?"

"Enough with the prostitution! Neither one of us is going to be a prostitute, good heavens."

"The only way I'll have any chance of providing for my child and I is if I get married—"

"And that's what I'm _saying_ ," Brit said, voice dropping again to a conspiratorial hiss. She seized up both of Helena's hands. "Marry me."

Helena's jaw dropped in disbelief.

"We can go to London," she said, "and get married in a church on the way. A young couple comes into a church for a discreet marriage when the bride's just pregnant, nobody will question it, they won't have any reason to think the groom's not the real father—"

"I think they have one very obvious reason to think the groom's not the father! Starting with the fact that she's no groom at all!"

"I'll be in disguise, obviously. Women disguise themselves as men to marry women all the time, I've read about it—they're called 'female husbands,' it's a—it's this whole _big thing_ in America—and they actually do it, they get away with it."

Helena let out a near-silent, disbelieving laugh. "And if they get away with it, how do people _know_ about this phenomenon?"

Brit hesitated. "They get away with it for a few years," she amended. "There might be even more that are never caught. Look!" She scrambled to her feet and straightened out her brother's coat. "You can't see my curves at all in this, can you?" She turned sideways, letting Helena see the silhouette of her chest. "You know costumes, it can't be all that hard to broaden the shoulders a bit and tailor it to fit me, can it? And you've had me reading the male parts in every play you've got your hands on since we learned to read—I'm not going to be commanding any encores at the Globe, but you know I can sound at least passably masculine, can't I?"

Helena looked Brit up and down uncertainly, then said, "The shrillest man in England, perhaps."

"Granted. But—people are largely logical, and logic is largely simple. If we walk into London, arm in arm, with a baby clearly on the way—what are people going to think? 'The father is unusually delicate-looking,' or 'the mother ran away from home with another woman who volunteered to dress as a man and pretend she'd fathered someone else's child'? It's too absurd to suspect! No one would do that."

"Then why are you doing it?"

Brit froze. "Ah."

"You're talking about _marriage_ ," Helena said. "To—to _me_."

"Yes. Yes, I am."

" _Why_? You—you could have your own life, marry who you want, have your own family—"

"I want your family," Brit said hotly.

Helena's jaw dropped again.

"Helena, I—" Brit shifted on her feet uncertainly for just a moment, searching for the right words—she'd been trying to find the right words for a decade—then came to a decision, dropped to one knee, and seized Helena's cool hands again. She looked into Helena's dark blue eyes—her face was glowing from the moonlight and starlight on her tear streaks—and said, "I've known you for twenty years, and I've been trying to find the words to say this to you for ten of them. We have always loved each other as well as if we'd been born sisters—but, I—as I've grown up, the love I've felt for you has become—not like an affection between two sisters, but, like a—like that a man has for a woman." Brit took a deep, shaky breath, and tried to keep her voice from shaking as she hurried on: "No matter what happens, if you're with child, then—then either we leave here together, or else our lives will be separated forever. As long as I have nothing to lose, I am—am commanded by my sentiments to confess—"

"Thank God!" Helena flung her arms around Brit's shoulders so violently she knocked them both into the grass. "I feel the same, I've always felt the same, I've never known how to tell you, I never dreamed you'd ever feel the same—"

Brit scrabbled to wrap her arms around Helena, wove her fingers into Helena's curly brass hair, and kissed her hard on the forehead.

And then Brit burst into noisy sobs.

###

"What will you go by? 'Brit' is certainly more masculine than 'Brittania,' but it's hardly a real name—"

"I have a name. I chose it years ago."

"Don't tell me you've been _planning_ to elope with me—"

"No, no, I—just fantasizing. And not just about you! If not with you, I was probably going to run off to London in my brother's trousers eventually, anyway—"

"What's the name?"

"Basil."

"Basil? I... well, it works..."

"The name Basil comes from the Greek word for emperors."

"Ah."

"But on _me_ , it's short for Basilisk."

" _Aha_!"

"What?"

" _That_ sounds more like you!"

"I... _shussh_."

###

Brit _had_ been planning to run away—for years.

Brit knew how to design weapons.

She'd learned from her grandmother—who, years ago, had seen Brit in her mother's arms examining the disassembled parts of the first gun that GF&S had ever sold, artfully mounted in a line in a frame in the company's main office lobby in London. Her grandmother had taken her aside and confessed in a gleeful whisper that she'd worked out the math and drawn the blueprints for her husband's gun designs; GF&S's earliest models were as much hers as they were his. Brit's grandmother had explained the basic principles behind how a simple pistol worked, and then, as Brit watched in fascination, she'd disassembled and reassembled one. It was like a puzzle.

Now, Brit could draw several of her grandfather and grandmother's blueprints by memory, and had designed more herself. Now, Brit could disassemble and reassemble any gun her family's company had ever made—and half of the tools and contraptions in her home. Now, Brit could wield a hammer, pliers, or drill as deftly and gracefully as Helena handled needles and thread.

At sixteen years old Brit had made an improvement to the barrel of one of their rifles that let it shoot straighter.

In return, she'd received a heartfelt thank you from her father and nothing else.

Someday, when her father died, her brother Gilbert was going to inherit Grace Firearms & Steel. He was going to run the business, have total executive control over the factories and manufacturing—if he wanted to, he could even learn to design guns and cannons as their grandfather had and make their next products himself.

Brit was going to inherit managing the estate's cooking, cleaning, entertaining, and upkeep. Unless she was lucky and married out, in which case she might get the honor of managing somebody else's estate. If she ever wanted anything more than that, she knew, she'd have to leave her family and go get it herself.

Over the past few years, she'd turned from designing weapons to modifying her furniture with hidden shelves and compartments; started stealing money, important papers, and valuables from the rest of the family, framing various servants for the thefts as necessary; and even planned how to fake her own death. On some level, she'd always felt like she was just playing a childish game. She'd never seen the day approaching when she was going through with it. But as soon as she returned from her predawn meeting with Helena, she started packing her ill-gotten goods. They were leaving together at midnight.

###

The hardest part of the day had been acting normal in front of her family. But they were used to thinking of her as "dreamy," "absent minded," "head in the clouds." (Was it any damn surprise she preferred the clouds when they gave her so little on ground level worth occupying her time? When she had been caught drawing blueprints for a vehicle designed to run on an engine similar to a train's without being confined to train tracks, her mother had nervously suggested she might prefer drawing portraits instead.) If she seemed more faraway than normal today, it clearly wasn't abnormal enough for them to comment on it.

The second hardest part of the day had been stealing a full set of clothes from her father's and Gilbert's rooms.

It wouldn't be the first time. She'd been sneakily borrowing clothes from the male members of the household for almost as long as she could remember (and getting scolded for it for just as long). But typically only a pair of boots borrowed from the gardener that she could lace tight enough around her ankles to keep them from sliding around, or her father's coat to wear over her dress, or a servant's pants when she planned to go on a long walk and felt she was unsupervised enough to get away from it, or her brother's hat—most often her brother's hat, so frequently Gilbert had told her more than once in exasperation to get her _own_ top hat—but never a full outfit. The idea of running around in a full set of oversized clothing had always seemed comical. But she'd get her new wardrobe adjusted soon enough, wouldn't she? Helena was an absolute sorceress with a needle, she'd have it fixed up in no time.

Imagining herself dressed like a proper gentleman made her heart pound in excitement.

###

She had a bomb in her room. It was designed to go off a quarter past midnight. When it did, the room would catch fire. She'd be long gone by then. She had years ago designed and built a cart to be pulled by a horse just in case this day ever came, and if anyone noticed a missing horse in the morning they would assume the fire had frightened it off. The Graces probably wouldn't care about a horse, anyway. They'd be too distraught over the tragic demise of their beloved daughter and sister, must have left a candle burning when she went to bed, must have fallen onto some of those dreadful chemicals she plays with, how awful, not even a skeleton left.

Right now, with the bomb peacefully tick away on the center of her bed, she should be hurrying to get herself and her supplies downstairs. But for a moment she wasn't moving. She was paralyzed. She had put on her brother's clothes—a full set of men's clothes, for the first time in her life—and nervously looked in the mirror as she settled the top hat on her head to see just how much a fool she was making of herself—

—and had made eye contact with the man in the mirror.

It would have been inaccurate to claim that Brittania died in that moment. Instead, it was more as though Basil suddenly realized she had never existed.

In her place, here he stood.

###

When the boom of Basil's bomb detonating spurred the horse from a trot to a gallop, Basil twisted around to look; the Grace estate was so far behind him that he couldn't even see it.

###

In the dim moonlight beneath the trees behind Helena's house, Basil spread his arms. "Well?"

"Oh, Brit! You look..." Helena clapped a hand over her mouth to hide a smile. "Like you're wearing pants that belong to somebody a head taller than you."

"Basil," he reminded her. "And I come up to Gilbert's nose, I'll have you know." Fortunately, Basil was tall for a woman; unfortunately, his brother was tall for a man. He gestured Helena aside when she tried to lift one of her trunks—that was a gentleman's job, wasn't it, and at any rate she shouldn't be lifting a massive box with all her worldly possessions in it with a baby on the way—and heaved it into the cart. "For now, I'm just trying not to stumble over the cuffs," he said, fiddling with his rolled-up coat sleeves to keep them from sliding back down over his hands. "We can do a quick job adjusting the hems at the train station, can't we? You have your sewing things, right?"

"In here," she said, lifting a large bag and patting it; then that, too, was tossed on the cart. Helena hiked up her skirt to sit on the saddle behind Basil—nobody would see this late at night—and wrapped her arms around his waist.

Their route took them back toward the Grace estate; they had to pass it to reach the village with the parish church, and then onward to the town with the nearest railroad station.

They were nearly to the estate before Basil worked up the nerve to get out the words that had been on the tip of his tongue since Helena had said _Brit_. "I think—perhaps..." Basil almost faltered, but went on; "until we've gotten used to referring to me as a man, we—probably ought to do the same in private. Don't you think? As practice. With my name, too. If we slip up and say the wrong name, and someone overhears..."

"You mean if _I_ slip up?"

Basil made a noncommittal noise.

"All right. I'll learn my lines." Helena kissed the nape of his neck. Warm tingles spread up to the crown of his head and down across his shoulder blades. "How long do you think until it's safe to go back to your real name?"

Basil's stomach twisted. "Ah," he said. He couldn't think of any other answer that wouldn't make him sick to say. He'd only tossed aside his name two hours ago; but already the thought of hearing it again pained him as much as if it was a close friend who had backstabbed him only two hours ago.

Helena waited for a moment; and when Basil didn't give an answer, she squeezed him tighter around the waist. "I see," she said. "Basil suits you better."

Basil loved her.

A red glow appeared over the horizon.

"What's that?" Helena asked.

"My distraction."

"Your...?" She spent a couple of seconds puzzling it out. Then gasped in horror. "No! You didn't!"

"I said I was going to fake my—"

"I thought you were _joking_ , not—In your own house?! With your family asleep?!"

"Just my own room! They'll get out, they'll be fine."

"You'll _destroy their home._ "

Basil wasn't sure how to tell her how little that thought bothered him.

He felt Helena's nails digging into his shirt. "I think it's bigger than just your bedroom."

Basil thought she was right. The flames licked up over the horizon.

When he slowed the horse and turned off the main road toward the estate, Helena didn't protest.

###

For the rest of his life, Basil's nightmares were going to be haunted by hellfire.

He turned away from the blazing skeleton of the house, spurring the horse back toward the main road.

"Wait!" Helena twisted around to look back at the house. "Your family!"

"Help's already there," Basil said roughly. He'd seen the silhouettes of several people against the flames. "There's nothing we can add. If we stop now, we'll lose our chance to get away."

"Br—Basil—"

Basil urged the horse faster. Helena clung to him tighter.

A day before, he'd cried into his fiancée's arms when she'd confessed she loved him too—cried so hard he had a headache when he got back to the estate.

This morning, as he watched his childhood home go up in flames with his only family in the world still inside, he didn't shed a tear.

It should have hurt so deeply he couldn't breathe. But all he felt was a mild ache in his stomach, a weight lifted off his shoulders, and shock at his own reaction.

###

They were at the door of the modest church in the next town over at the crack of dawn, both pale from nerves, both with dark circles under their eyes from exhaustion, fingers laced together so tightly their hands shook and knuckles looked white. The priest looked at the pair of them—a young woman from the next town over whose family only visited the church infrequently and who seemed to perpetually keep one hand pressed protectively over her stomach, and a man that the priest didn't recognize who hardly looked older than a boy and who wore fine but ill-fitting clothing, neither one wearing rings, both looking terrified and hopeful—and waved them in with an understanding nod.

As soon as they'd met the bare minimum legal requirements for marriage, they hurried to the nearest town with a rail line and caught the first train toward London.

On Helena's ring finger was a ring Basil had stolen from his mother's jewelry box: a gold snake with two ruby eyes.

###

Basil and Helena had been in London for three days before the papers reported on the burnt-down manor in the country. No survivors.

As Helena held Basil tightly, comfortingly, and cried quietly on his behalf, all he could think was that the papers he'd stolen and brought with him were more than adequate to prove that he was the sole surviving heir to the Grace fortune and company.

They could go anywhere in the world they wanted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not bullshitting about snake jewelry being big in the Victorian era, [check it out](https://www.1stdibs.com/blogs/the-study/victorian-snake-jewelry/). How perfect is that for Sir Pent?
> 
> Posts for the fic available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/624938098769395712/snake-in-the-grass-ch-1-of-4-birth) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/ckret2/status/1288290611259494400?s=20). Comments/reblogs there are very welcome (as are comments here)!
> 
> (... Okay, show of hands, how many of y'all were expecting me to write more RadioSnake for the "lovestruck" prompt?)


	2. Rise

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to get to Sir Pent becoming "Sir Pent" in this chapter, but I wrote 3800 words today, Firefox crashed on me, I had to reboot my computer and try to edit the chapter on my phone, and due to the reboot the only saved copy I have of the _entire fic_ is saved on an app, that for _god only knows what_ reason, is _refusing_ to maintain the italics when I paste out of that app into _any other app or site I can possibly thing of,_ meaning that I can fucking stare at the italics trapped in this app that I can't move anywhere else except by visually comparing the version of the fic in that app to the stripped version pasted somewhere else—
> 
> Okay okay okay I saved the italicized-but-unpasteable version of the document as .html instead of a text doc and opened it in a browser so I could directly copy/paste the htmled version of the fic which DOES have the italics tags, _je_ sus _fuck_ ing _christ_ it should not be this hard in 2020 to copy/paste _italics_ between two different programs, oh my fucking god.
> 
> Anyway that's the reason why this chapter didn't cover as much ground as I wanted. Sir Pent will get his REAL final name start of next chapter.

"... And that's my wife, Helena, over there! Hello, Helena! That's her. We're having our first. In about five months. Can't tell you how excited we are. I confess, I'm so ecstatic I can hardly even think up names. Of course, you've got your Alberts and Marys and Elizabeths and Johns, sure, but one doesn't want their child to go through life with a name where if somebody calls for them, ten different people will look up, does one? Do you have any? Children, I mean! Or—or names, if you have any names you're not using..."

That was more or less how Basil introduced himself to half of the guests on the ship headed toward New York.

He'd gotten himself in trouble within the first three days by sneaking down below decks to see how the engines worked—trains he was familiar enough with, but ships were entirely new beasts he'd only read about in books—and since then had been furiously scribbling out new blueprints, thinking up ways to make the engines more compact and more powerful. He carried piles of paper around with him, perpetually risking them getting soaked, with engine designs on one side and long list of names he'd coerced out of the other passengers scribbled on the backs.

A week into the trip, just a couple of days out from New York, Basil came into their room, called out, "I've _got_ it," slammed the door, slapped a pile of papers onto a metal tray and pinned them down with a magnet he'd been using as a paperweight, and had tromped halfway across the room before he realized his wife was asleep again. "Oh."

Helena had been more than happy to spend most afternoons napping since they'd boarded the ship, largely because its swaying brought back the awful ghost of her morning sickness and she couldn't do much else but wait until it had abated. Which was a pity; the other guests absolutely loved her, and Basil loved watching them love her—actress that she was, yesterday she'd captivated a dozen other guests by recounting (and exaggerating) a hilarious three-way argument she and Basil had witnessed a few days before departing from London, performing all three combatants' dialogue simply by putting on a different voice for each of them—but, if she was feeling unwell, far be it for Basil to selfishly try to show her off to the guests. Nor to wake her from her rest. He crept back toward the door.

But Helena was already sitting up, peering at him groggily. "Brih..." She yawned. "Mh, no. Basil? What is it?"

"It can wait, love. Get your rest."

Helena sat up, and Basil's heart leaped into his throat at the realization that she'd stripped down to her chemise and drawers. It was hardly as though it was the first time he'd seen her in nothing but her underwear—they'd changed clothes in front of each other plenty of times as children long before it had held any significance for either of them, and the past few weeks he had seen her in _far_ less than that—but even now it still sent a flurry of nerves through him. To see her so intimately, with her hair down and almost nothing on, to know that she trusted him to see her this way, to think of what a thin layer of fabric stood between his hands and her skin if he dared to touch—

But that was _quite_ a different topic from the one he'd come in to discuss.

"I should be getting up anyway." She squinted out their porthole at the sky, then turned to give a bleary look to her pocket watch on the bedside table. "What's on your mind? Some fabulous flying machine?"

"No, no flying machines." He paused thoughtfully, trying to imagine combining the screw-like propeller on the back of their steam liner with Da Vinci's screw-shaped flying machine. "Not _yet._ "

"Then what?"

Basil decided he was a bit overdressed for his present company, draped his coat over the back of the chair nearest the bed and set his hat on the bedside table so it could join the conversation, and sat. "Names," he said. "I've got a list of names a mile long—"

"Yes," Helena laughed, "I've seen you harassing the other passengers for the names of their dead great-aunts."

"— _and_ ," Basil went on, "I've finally narrowed it down to half a foot long." He brandished a list of names, the top half of the page originally labeled "GIRL" and the bottom half labeled "BOY," until he'd scratched out those labels and impishly replaced them with "YOUNG LADY GRACE" and "YOUNG SIR GRACE."

Helena laughed again. "Goodness, Basil, you've—got it all decided without me, haven't you?"

"Nothing like that." He untied the bun in his hair and ran his fingers through to straighten it out. "I humbly submit these proposals for your consideration, and am eager to hear your judgments." He laced his hands between his knees, tried to calm his nerves, and also tried to keep a straight face while he waited for her to notice the fifth name on the boy's side.

"I see." She read through the list, frowned slightly in confusion, and said, "All the names have a pair?" She read off a couple, "'Joseph' with 'Josephine' listed after it, 'Alexa' and 'Alexander'..."

Basil hesitated, then nodded. "Yes, I—one of the most important matters of consideration."

"Am I expecting twins now?"

Basil allowed himself a brief moment to bask in the glorious fantasy of having _two_ children. Then he quickly said, "No, no, that's not a... I thought it important to have a..." He paused for a moment, ruminating over how to present it. "It might be prudent to ensure, whichever sex the child is, it be given a name that has a... a matching pair of the opposite sex."

Helena stared at Basil, still clearly uncomprehending. "How so?"

Basil cleared his throat. "In case the child grows up—like me." He laced his hands between his knees. "And—and finds that it—well, if we raise it as a girl and it decides to live as a man, or as a boy and it wants to live as a woman, as loving parents I'd say the best thing we could do for it is make that as easy as possible, wouldn't you?"

Helena's eyes lit up. "Ah. Yes. I see. If we have a little girl we've been calling 'Victoria' her whole life, it's no problem to switch to 'Victor'..."

Basil sighed in relief. "Right. Yes, exactly," he said. "Except we can't go with _that_ particular name, but."

"Why not? You've got it on your list."

"No—on the boy side. We can name a boy 'Victor' and switch to 'Victoria' later, but we can't name a girl 'Victoria' and switch to 'Victor.'"

Helena stared blankly at him, and asked again, "Why not?"

Even though there was no chance anybody could hear them though the walls, Basil automatically lowered his voice, "One of the only reasons we've gotten this far is because I've been signing everything with my initial for _years_."

He'd first developed an aversion to the name he was given at birth at around ten years old; while he'd convinced everyone around him to call him a shortened version of it, on paper he'd hacked it down even further. Every document he had been asked to sign for over a decade read _B. Grace_. It was the reason he'd chosen a new name for himself with the same initial. Between a handful of documents that only a member of the Grace family should have, a signature that matched one of the family's already on file, and the tragic circumstances of his sudden inheritance rushing proceedings too much for anyone to feel the need to make a laborious trip from London to the parish church and comb through the old birth registers for the names of all the Grace children... If he'd been signing as "Brit" or, heaven forbid, "Brittania," they never would have pulled this off.

Even so, they were lucky they _had_ pulled it off. And if any child of Basil's ever felt the need to murder its parents, change its name, dress as the opposite sex, and flee the country, by God, Basil was going to make it as easy for his child as possible.

"If I _hadn't_ signed with my initial, it would have been impossible to modify my old name into my new name," he said. "Any documents that list my old name _with_ my signature are useless to us now. But, if I had a name that was easy to modify—say, if I'd been born 'Clara' and could add a couple of letters and to make 'Clarance'..."

Helena raised her brows. "You're preparing to help our unborn child forge legal documents?"

Basil put a hand over his heart. "Could I call myself a loving father if I did _less?_ "

Helena smacked his arm, grinned crookedly, and said, "I can't believe I considered running off with a bunch of actors. You've got all the drama and theatrics I could ever ask for."

Basil beamed. "Is it alright with you, then? If we...?"

Helena nodded. "As long as we can find a name that isn't horrible."

"I think you'll like these!" Basil shifted over from the chair to the bed, sitting beside Helena and wrapping an arm around her shoulders. "I tried to get some _romantic_ -sounding ones."

"Ooh, did you?" She turned back to the list with renewed interest.

Basil glanced at his top hat to make eye contact with the goggles, winked conspiratorially, and turned toward the list to try to keep a straight face while he waited again for Helena to reach the fifth item on the boy's list.

She cracked up. "Bert and _Bertrude?!_ "

Innocently, Basil asked, "You don't like Bert?"

"So you offer drama _and_ comedy!"

"And anything else you want."

While Helena was still giggling, Basil leaned over to give her a crooked kiss that landed as much on her teeth as on her lips. She kissed him back, reached for his bow tie, and pulled him down on the bed.

Basil reached over to the bedside table and turned his hat around so its goggles faced the other way.

###

For a girl, they picked the name Julia (or Julian). For a boy, Basil had liked the name Earl (or Pearl, which meant they'd have to remember to always write young Earl's name in all capital letters so that if they someday had to stick a P on front of all of Earl's old legal documents it didn't come out looking like PEarl—which was easy enough for Basil, since he always used all caps when he was writing in print, but Helena nixed the idea). They'd finally agreed upon August (or Augusta).

At dinner that evening, with Helena's long curly hair pinned up artfully and Basil's long straight hair tucked up under his hat, they might as well have been at the center of the world. Talking with the other travelers about their various plans in America, Basil expressed excitement over finally getting to see the stateside half of his family's firearm business—he'd heard an American factory in action was a terrifying, awe-inspiring sight—and Helena wondered which cities were best for raising a child in and whether the United States had any theaters worth speaking of. "Oh, they _must_ have, haven't they, wasn't their president shot in a theater a few months ago?"

"Who do they put in charge of the nation if the president is shot in between elections? Another man in his family? I suppose it's too much to expect them to let his wife rule."

"They probably have another election, dear."

The homeward-bound Americans at the table hastily corrected them.

Helena was wearing a pink dress. Over half of her dresses were pink, and over the course of the past few weeks Basil had begun to suspect that none of her dresses that _weren't_ pink had made it into the trunk she'd taken from her home. Pink was her favorite color. It was one of the first things Basil had learned about her, some twenty years ago, when they'd met during one of his father's trips in to town. He'd run off with her to help her find dog roses and had used the hem of his skirt to protect his fingers as he ripped the flowers off their thorny stems so they could shove as many pastel pink petals as possible between her curls.

Basil was still, to this day, trying to fling decorations at Helena that he thought she'd like; at the collar of her dress, in the center of her chest, she was wearing a brooch that he'd purchased for her in London the moment he'd received his family's inheritance. The center of it was a star ruby—an oval-shaped ruby polished into a dome rather than cut at sharp angles, with a six-armed white starburst that shone in the center when the light struck it just right. In bright daylight it looked nearly fuchsia, and something about the rays of the "star" in the center of the ruby reminded Basil of the eye of a slit-pupiled animal.

Helena had worn it every day since she'd received it.

Basil couldn't look away from her.

###

"Yes, of the Grace family," Basil said, smiling at the man in front of him. Every man in the room had a beard but him. He felt naked.

"Not the French ones, I presume?"

"No, of course not. The _British_ ones." Every man in the office was some bigwig in the American military. Basil had only caught half their names. He felt like he'd conned his way into this room. He kind of liked the feeling.

"Yeees, yes. We've heard of _you_ people." The military man offered Basil a wide smile. "We've been doing business with Sir Grace for years. I suppose he's your...?"

"Yes, he was my father."

The military man's eyebrows shot up. "Was?"

Basil set his mouth in a grim line. "I suppose you wouldn't have heard about the fire."

"I did," said another man standing near the door. "I work closely with GF&S's head office, I got a telegram when it happened. It was only a few weeks ago, wasn't it?"

Basil nodded somberly. "A—terrible tragedy, I'm afraid."

"The report said there weren't any survivors?" He gave Basil a querying look.

"Survivors from the _house_ , no. From the _family_ , yes; I was in London at the time..."

###

An excerpt from a history book about commerce in America during the Reconstruction Era (the fifteen year period between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Serpentine Era):

"... But of all the business luminaries and burgeoning tycoons of the Reconstruction Era, the most notable outlier was Basil Grace, and for a multitude of reasons.

"First, unlike other major businessmen who dominated the era—such as Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller—Grace wasn't an American-born citizen, but a transplant, arriving in the United States in late 1865 or early 1866 from England with the intent of collecting on the debts owed to Grace Firearms & Steel in the wake of the Civil War.

"Second, Grace was not only an entrepreneur, but also an inventor in his own right—on par with Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Nikola Tesla, all of whom built upon new technologies that had been pioneered at Grace Firearms & Steel. Under his leadership, Grace Firearms produced—among many other innovations—train engines, safes, equipment for mines and oil wells, a combine harvester propelled by a steam engine when most other contemporary combine harvesters necessitated a team of horses to pull them for another forty years.

"Third, unlike other well-known tycoons who got their start after the Civil War in their twenties and were active into the dawn of the twentieth century, Grace was only active for a little more than a decade before mysteriously vanishing. His company was such a well-oiled machine that it seemingly continued on profitably without him for several more years before its assets and facilities were split up or sold off to outside investors.

"Fourth, his remarkably—but inconsistently—progressive politics. He was an outspoken proponent of women's suffrage for as long as he lived in the United States (even when, as a non-citizen, he himself couldn't vote), as well as women's rights to inherit property, to pursue higher education, and to work in a variety of industries where at the time employing women would have been unthinkable. A series of scandals made him well-known for approaching his business rivals' wives to seek their input on how to undermine their own husbands, a venture at which he was shockingly successful—even occasionally hiring these women to take important positions in his own company as their husbands' businesses collapsed in ruin.

"This mix of enlightenment and ruthlessness is just as evident in his dealings with labor, where he mercilessly exploited his labor force, and dominated entire towns with his industries to prevent workers from simply seeking out better-paying competitors. Most notoriously, many of his most exploitative tactics would be directly replicated during the Dust Bowl by employers who trapped their own employees in a cycle of starvation that forced them to pay all of their own wages directly back to company grocery stores. On the other hand, Grace also expressed great admiration for the work done by manual laborers, acknowledging repeatedly that even his visionary engineering genius wouldn't have got Grace Firearms & Steel anywhere without the thousands of workers who contributed the better part of their waking lives to laboring for the business—an almost Marxist sentiment.

"But in contrast to contemporaries like Carnegie, who waxed poetic about the importance of unions and his solidarity with the working man in his public writings, but viciously crushed unions and depressed wages in his steel mills, Grace wasn't in denial to himself about whose interests he was supporting. Instead, he always maintained a clear but callous understanding of the consequences of his business practices.

"Despite his admiration of and approval for common laborers, Grace never claimed to be on their side, once going so far as to write in a letter to a railroad magnate that 'a well-governed trades-union consisting of honest, hardworking, morally-upright laborers is the greatest possible threat to our vaunted class of blood-sucking leeches.' He never attempted to reconcile his business practices with his stated morals, instead choosing to tout the moral rectitude of pro-labor practices, acknowledge that he did not institute most of these practices himself, and further acknowledge his own cruelty.

"And the fifth and greatest difference that sets him apart from the other Gilded Age tycoons is that none of them are popularly suspected to be Sir Pentious. Indeed, ever since historians first theorized Grace could be Sir Pentious, some fifty years after Grace's disappearance, no other suspect has usurped him as the top contender for Sir Pentious's ignoble title. The evidence suggesting that 'Basil Grace' himself was using a pseudonym, and was perhaps even the unknown arsonist who assassinated the family that rightfully owned Grace Firearms & Steel, seems to only lend credence to the theory. Even some scholars who don't believe that Grace is Sir Pentious support the theory that Sir Pentious assassinated Grace and seized control of his munitions empire.

"Despite the massive influence Grace had on shaping American industry in his own life, it's doubtful today that his name would still be so well-known as it is if not for the compelling (albeit largely circumstantial) evidence that he was also the man who invented the concept of the supervillain.

"Whether or not 'Basil Grace' was another of the notorious Sir Pentious's pseudonyms, it's undeniable that he was the most hardened and heartless of the Gilded Age's cutthroat robber-barons."

###

Basil clutched the baby to his chest and bawled inconsolably. He was almost louder than baby August.

"Basil, please," Helena said, exhausted.

"I can't help it! He's so small," Basil wailed. "Look at his nose, his little nose is so _wee!_ "

"He didn't _feel_ small."

"I can't believe you made this! In your body! And pushed him out into the world! And here he is. Nothing I could possibly invent will ever match this little boy." He bent over to kiss Helena's temple. And then pressed his face into her shoulder and burst into noisy sobs again. "I love you so much! I love him! He's perfect!"

Despite her exhaustion, Helena smiled weakly and patted his elbow.

Muffled, Basil squeaked, "And did you see his tiny toes?"

"I'll check when you give him back."

Basil cuddled August protectively. "One more minute." August wriggled in Basil's arms.

###

This was a miserable, blighted stretch of land.

He held a handkerchief over his mouth and nose as his train drew closer to its destination; this close to town, the soot even made it into the closed car. The trees were cut down and or burned off, the sky was hazy and brownish-gray, the land barren except for the black straight railway lines heading toward a lonely town. High walls surrounded the town and its many smoke-spewing factories and barracks.

Nothing and no one was near the town, on purpose. Basil had made an important discovery: if you wiped out your competitors, hired up all their skilled laborers who suddenly had nowhere else to work, move them and their families to your own private town in the middle of nowhere, and paid them dirt, then they couldn't afford to leave. They spent what they earned on food. When you owned a town, you could decide what food costed. Half the money you saved on wages went into the pockets of politicians who might have otherwise raised concerns and the other half stayed in your own pocket.

Although Basil was beginning to wonder whether it might be more efficient to go into politics himself.

On the one hand, he felt a perverse pride in the way he'd twisted and reshaped this land under the force of his vision: even if it was ugly, charred, and dead, it was something _he_ had done, an indelible mark _he_ had left on this world. He wasn't sure if his pleasure was the satisfaction of a god building up a universe that fit his specifications, or the satisfaction the devil got from throwing a brick through the meticulously-crafted stained glass window of God's plan. He embraced it either way. Both were power. Both had domains they ruled.

On the other hand, looking at the sharp faces of his hardened, haggard workers made him ache to hold Auggie's pudgy little hands and lose himself in Helena's soft embrace.

He'd see them when he got home in a few days. This wasn't a place either of them needed to see. Helena was uncomfortable with looking at the darker sides of Basil's business—and he didn't want either one of them breathing in this air.

When he was _there_ , Basil could have love; but when he was _here_ , he could have his kingdom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, I am exhausted, I don't have the energy to put my normal historical context footnotes here. Just assume that anything I said about capitalist tycoons and/or rare gemstones is true and I'll drag myself back in here to add proper footnotes later.
> 
> Posts for this chapter available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/625037400933056512/basilisk-in-the-grass-ch-2-of-4-rise) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/ckret2/status/1288687813794435074?s=20). Comments/reblogs there are HIGHLY (as are comments here)! Like seriously, the mere mechanical process of trying to get this chapter posted was an unmitigated fiasco, a comment if you're enjoying this would really help my evening.


	3. Fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Pentious Week day 4: "Victorian Times (AKA when he was alive)"! Here's the chapter that's a doozy. Not gonna put notes on this one yet because I finished this chapter past midnight and about four hours past my bedtime. I'm gonna be paying for this tomorrow, hahaaa. Worth it though.
> 
> This chapter is _hella_ unedited—I haven't even had time to skim through it to make sure I, like... didn't leave out paragraphs?? But I'm determined to get this up as close to the Official Day it's supposed to go on as possible. If anything in here is confusing please please please throw me a "hey what the fuck?" because I probably left out some words/sentences and I don't want y'all readers to be confused.

When Basil was eleven years old, his family had gone to the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. His father and grandfather had been intimidated by the new American manufacturing process on display—a man had taken apart ten guns, shuffled up the parts, and reassembled the guns with mix-and-match pieces, something that at even Basil's young age he'd known was a miraculous feat. He'd taken apart enough firearms to know you couldn't mix pieces across Grace guns like that.

Basil's father had spent the next dozen years getting a factory running in America to ensure their firearms kept pace with developments in the ex-colonies; and Basil had spent the same time desperately eager to see these American factory where, he had been told, machines did the work of assembling more machines and humans hardly needed to do more than get them going.

Basil loved American machines. He loved how every other inventor and entrepreneur he met was as eager to pioneer new inventions as he was, as fascinated by the limitless potential of steel and steam. He loved the breathtaking efficiency of factories. He loved the art in machines crafted with such meticulous skill that you no longer needed skilled laborers to run them—gun stocks that had once taken a master craftsman a whole day to produce by hand could now be drilled from a plank of wood by a twelve-year-old.

What he didn't love was American finance. Wall Street was as petty and backbiting a lot as Basil had ever had the displeasure of crossing paths with; and if they kept their games to gambling on the price of gold with each other, Basil would be happy to ignore the lot of them.

But no. Their financial games included trying to gobble up as many other companies as they could stand to swallow—steel, oil, cattle, railroads, anything heavy and profitable—and, when the proper owners of said companies were resistant to being devoured, they'd cut them up into bite-sized pieces first. Over the past five or six years, they'd tried to sink their teeth into the newly-revitalized Grace Firearms & Steel more than once.

Basil usually responded by snatching one of his current competitor's prized holdings out from under him—it didn't hurt to have a domestic company to supply his steel blanks, and once he held his favored railway line he had an incentive to build it some bridges so train cars didn't have to be ferried across rivers—and he was good at playing Wall Street's financial games. But he didn't enjoy them. They were weaselly and finicky and involved far too much time spent bribing judges when Basil felt more and more like he'd rather just _shoot_ the judges.

Helena asked him not to talk like that in front of Auggie. She had a point, so he didn't; but he suspected that she was really trying to say she didn't want him talking like that in front of her.

So he kept his thoughts to himself as he began to seriously wonder if shooting a particularly stubborn judge _would_ be fun.

###

"Planning a theft, boss," the foreman said, nodding at the two young men. "A whole crate of rifles."

"Running off to start your own militia?" Basil asked wryly. They both looked at their feet, sweating with fear.

As they should. Sir Grace was known to be unmerciful with difficult workers.

Basil nodded to the foreman, said, "I'll take care of them." The two workers' eyes followed his hand as he casually grabbed up an iron rod with a magnet on the end that was kept on hand to fish fallen parts from hard-to-reach places in the factory machinery. They should have been keeping their eyes on his other hand, tracing the custom curling snake motif carved into the grip of his holstered revolver.

The foreman said nothing. He knew how bad workers were fired at the factories far from cities.

He gestured with the iron rod toward the back door.

The loading dock behind the factory was currently empty, the river behind it churning slowly by. Out here, the noise of the factory was still more than loud enough to cover up a couple of gun shots. "So," Basil asked. "Who else is in on it?"

For a moment they stared at him in confusion.

"Come on," Basil chided. "You weren't taking these home to collect them. Either you've got a customer, or you've got another friend who can find one. Who is it?"

The workers glanced at each other. Basil tightened his grip on the rod.

The taller one said, "We don't—"

"Band of bandits, sir," the shorter blurted out. "They've got this system of robbing boats on the Mississippi—put up chains across the river to block them and then board. They just need guns. He's got a letter."

"No I don't!" the tall one cried.

"Damn you, yes you do."

Basil's brows raised. The plot thickened. He considered that momentarily; then asked, "What sort of loot?"

The men hesitated again, as if not sure why Basil wanted to know. Finally, the shorter one said, "Mainly passenger boats. They take the passengers hostage, rob them, and let them go."

Of course—passengers were about the only thing moving on the Mississippi now; cargo that used to be shipped south to New Orleans was now taken by train to the east coast ports instead. Basil had been keeping a close eye on passenger travel on the Mississippi. One of his most obnoxious current rivals—a man who used to dominate the Mississippi's cargo shipping until it started dying off—had split his interests between boats for passenger travel and the railroad business so he could stay in the business of shipping cargo. He'd been eyeing Basil's line with its newly-built bridges for a couple of years now. Basil hadn't even wanted the damn railroad line in the first place, but now that he had it, like hell was he going to let this vulture take it.

Basil had been looking for a way to undermine him for months. His passenger boats seemed like his weak point. If anything wrong happened there, he'd bleed money.

A rash of bandit attacks scaring off all his customers might just do the job, mightn't they?

Not with _chains_ , though. Too much that could go wrong there. What the bandits needed was fast moving boats, fast enough to let them catch the boat from around a bend or from behind and small enough not to attract attention. Basil could make that. Take the propellers steam liners used, shrink them—that was the easy part—make them more powerful—that was the hard part—but he could do it. It wouldn't do to load the whole back of the boats with a pile of coal to keep the engine going, though; what else could he use? Oil was a possibility, but he'd have to make a lot of changes to the engine—but he could do it. If he canceled a couple of engagements, he could probably have a prototype in a couple of weeks.

Maybe he could invite the vulture himself down in a few weeks to discuss railroad matters. Maybe he could ensure that a trap would be waiting for him.

"How much are these bandits offering for my guns?"

Shamefaced, the taller one said, "T—twenty dollars per gun, sir."

Under half what they were worth, but a tidy profit if you'd obtained them for free. It might still be worth it for Basil to make the deal—getting that pest away from his railroads was worth the loss. Perhaps he could arrange a better bargain.

He'd always wanted to try his hand at piracy.

Basil's hand left his revolver to hold it toward the taller man, palm up, gesturing with his fingers. "Well?" he said. "Hand it over."

"Sir?"

"Your letter."

The taller boy, hands shaking, passed over the letter. Basil checked it to make sure it had a time and meeting place, then stuffed it in an inner coat pocket and rested his hand over his revolver again.

This time the shorter of the two noticed the gesture. He tensed.

He was probably about to run for it. Basil couldn't waste any more time. He drew his revolver; the shorter man drew one too; Basil flinched, cocked his gun—

The shorter man fired.

The taller man tumbled to the ground.

Basil stared at the shorter man. "Pardon?"

The shorter man dropped the gun, waved his hands in a panic as he tried to figure out where to put them, then snapped off a sloppy salute. "He's been dealt with, sir. What are your orders?"

Basil continued to stare. Then gave him a baffled smile. " _Pardon?_ "

The man cleared his throat. "You—you want to go through with the bargain, sir. Right? You'll need a bodyguard. And—and someone the bandits already know to introduce you."

Oh, sharp thing. Basil _liked_ this one. He sized him up, kicked the dropped gun to the side, then holstered his own revolver. "Well." He gestured between the body and the river. "Take our the trash."

As the man was struggling to drag the much larger corpse to the river, Basil asked, "What's you name?"

"Chess Chester, sir."

Basil cackled.

Defensively, Chess said, "My _mother_ gave me that name."

"Oh, that's hardly an excuse! My mother gave me one, too." And _he'd_ had the sense to switch it out for a more fitting one, hadn't he?

Although the longer he had it, the less fitting it felt. It had suited him perfectly back when it had been a threatening hiss, _Bassilisssk Graccce_. But he'd been wearing the name for almost six years, listening to Americans say it over and over, and its luster had worn off. Now it was just _Bay-zil Grayce_. His name had stopped feeling like a curved knife's blade and become a child's colorful wooden toy.

"I suggest you head on home, Chess. You're not going to be welcome back in there." He jerked his chin toward the factory. "Consider this a promotion to personal assistant."

###

"Good work ferreting them out," Basil said, nodding to the foreman as he passed. "I'll see to it you get a bonus for this." And he'd secret a crate of guns away from one of his northern factories, to ensure that this foreman wasn't the one who took the fall when the loss was discovered.

Which of his middle managers did he dislike enough to frame?

###

August glanced up at Basil through a mop of curly brown bangs. (He should have had his hair cut by now, but he hated having his hair cut. The last time he'd kept sadly tugging his short bangs straight to make them a little bit longer. He must have gotten that from Basil.) "Why are you looking at me, papa?"

Sitting on a low stool with his elbow on his knee, his cheek in his hand, and a dumb smile on his face, Basil said, "Because I'm watching you tie your shoelaces."

August looked down at his shoes and the hopeless tangle of knots he'd made of them—although a single actual loop had managed to sneak in on his left shoe—and then looked up at Basil. "Why?"

"Because I want to see if you can do it."

August looked down at his shoes again and said uncertainly, "I did it."

Basil laughed. "Do you want me to show you how to do it so they look like mine?"

"Yes!"

"All right! Let's do it in the dining room. Come on, Auggie—" Basil scooped August into his arms with a grunt, positioned him in his arms, and carried him downstairs. He was getting heavier. Taller, too. These days he looked less like a ball of soft dough squished into human shape and more like he actually an actual skeleton supporting him somewhere. He was growing up so fast. It was probably still years yet until Auggie was going to be too big for Basil to carry him—especially with his constant hands-on involvement with the factory prototypes keeping him in such good shape—but he already dreaded the prospect of being unable to hold his son to his chest and carry him around.

"Where did you go this time?" August asked on the way to the dining room.

"Illinois! You remember visiting Chicago? I was near there."

Auggie had already gotten used to the fact that Basil tended to leave their home in Philadelphia for up to a week at a time (but God as his witness, as soon as Basil got legislation pushed through to allow his sixty miles per hour train engines on the tracks, he was cutting that time in half), and then stay home for several days working on blueprints and letters in the library. It killed Basil to spend so much time away from Helena and Auggie. He'd talked with Helena about moving closer to work, but ultimately the kinds of places where he kept his factories weren't the kinds of places where he wanted his wife and child living. He refused to be the sort of father that his father had been, blithely content to assume that his wife was taking care of whatever child-rearing or housekeeping needed to be done and oblivious to his family's day-to-day life; but as hard as he tried, he was constantly afraid that he was missing everything important.

Helena always reassured him that the other ladies she got together with to sew and discuss the news were in constant awe and disbelief when she told them how much of the household's affairs he was on top of—from handling all the research on nearby schools for when Auggie started his education, to keeping on top of hiring, directing, and monitoring the hired help, and even (to the staggering skepticism of Helena's sewing friends) tidying up the house himself if Helena mentioned company was coming and the maid wasn't coming in that day. According to the other ladies, compared to their husbands, Basil was almost _over_ involved.

He considered it faint praise. He _knew_ those ladies' husbands.

August stole Basil's hat off his head and put it on his own; Basil obligingly pretended August was just too slick for Basil to notice the theft. August asked, "Is Chicago the one with the big water?"

"That's right." With his hat off, Basil took the opportunity to undo his bun and let down his hair.

August had seen the ocean before, but Basil and Helena had emphasized to him that Lake Michigan was _not_ an ocean, it was a _different_ kind of water that, for the sort of water that it was, was _very big_. Auggie hadn't quite registered the difference between an ocean and a lake yet, but had duly remembered that the water near _Chicago_ was the _big_ one.

In the dining room, Basil sat at his chair and plopped Auggie down on his lap. They'd beaten both Helena and dinner into the dining room, but he could smell it cooking in the kitchen. Basil leaned over to see around Auggie's stolen hat so he could to carefully untie his knotted shoelaces, leaned forward to kiss Auggie's cheek, and said, "Now watch carefully."

They continued practicing until dinner was ready.

###

"How long are you staying in Philadelphia this time?"

"Four days." Basil shut his eyes and pulled Helena onto his lap as she started unbuttoning his shirt. "But then next time I'll be able to stay for a fortnight."

"That long!"

"I know. It's unbelievable."

Helena started unlacing Basil's corset—a modified design (Helena's handiwork) that helped bind down his breasts and added padding around his waist to straighten out his curves. Although it still couldn't do anything about his damn thighs. "Where to this time?"

He pressed his face into the crook of her neck. "Back to Illinois."

"Oh? What have you got going on there?"

Basil suspected that wasn't the kind of thing Helena wanted to hear about.

Helena's fingers slowed down. "Basil?"

"I'll tell you if you insist." He couldn't decide for her whether she wantedto hear.

For a moment, she was silent. Then she continued loosening his corset.

He shrugged it off, kissed her collar bone, and began to unbutton her petticoat.

###

The next time Basil was away from home, he proudly read in his daily telegram from Helena that Auggie had (lopsidedly, but successfully) tied his shoes by himself every day since Basil had taught him.

He kept the telegram in his pocket as he and Chess went to meet with the gang of aspiring river bandits.

###

"For free?" the bandit leader asked dubiously. "The guns _and_ these fancy boats?"

"As an investment in what I see as a _very_ promising business enterprise," Basil said, a smirk twisting the corner of his mouth. "I do, of course, expect that the investment will pay off for me."

The leader glanced at the woman beside him—Basil hadn't worked out their relationship yet, definitely lovers, not sure if spouses—and after a silent exchange conveyed solely through strategically quirked eyebrows, the leader glanced back at Basil. "You're higher up the ladder at GF&S than the first guy we talked to, aren't you?"

"You could say that."

"Fine. We don't do business like you rich New England types. None of this 'fifty percent of the take' just for getting us the guns or nothing like that."

"I'd never. I hate to break it to you fine ladies and gentlemen, but crime really _doesn't_ pay. You can rob the richest riverboat in the nation and I'll probably make twice that in a month just by legally underpaying my coal miners."

The leader blinked at Basil in disbelief, and beside Basil, Chess shifted uncomfortably. People were usually surprised the first time they heard how candid he was about his business practices.

And the gang here already had to have thought he looked like a rather strange man; Basil had decided that if he was going to enter into actual criminal proceedings, then couldn't show up looking like _Basil Grace_. He'd shown up with his long, straight hair down a strange enough sight on a well-dressed gentleman to turn heads but also serving as a curtain to make his features harder to pick out—the first time he'd worn it down in public since he'd stopped wearing dresses. He felt exposed. He felt liberated.

But whatever the leader thought about Basil, all he asked was, "So what is it you want, then?"

"Only two things. First, whatever your associates here," Basil nodded toward the other rough-looking members of the gang, "consider to be a fair share of the take per whatever your typical division process is; after a few jobs, that should be more than enough to make up the cost of the weapons I'll be diverting. And second, a voice in selecting which targets you will and won't hit."

The leader sat back and stroked his beard, considering the offer. He glanced at the woman.

She said, "We only pay outsiders flat rates for their assistance. You want a fair share of the take, you've gotta do a fair share of the dirty work."

Basil felt a vicious grin stretch across his face. "Oh, I was _hoping_ you'd say that!"

He had earned himself another disbelieving blink. The leader said, "You're a strange fellow, Mr. Pentious."

"That's _Sir,_ please. I'm English. It doesn't work without the 'Sir.'"

"Fine, Sir Pentious."

He'd spent the whole train ride out brainstorming a multitude of increasingly terrible snake pun-themed names to use as a code name. This one had felt right.

It sounded right, too.

###

It was supposed to be a quick robbery and quick getaway, no blood spilled.

But as the gang had gone around, waving their GF&S guns at anyone who started to look too courageous, the leader and his partner barking orders, Sir Pentious made eye contact from across the passenger's compartment with the damned Wall Street vulture who was after Sir Pentious's railroad.

Even beneath the brim of Sir Pentious's hat, even through the black waterfall of Sir Pentious's hair, the vulture saw his face—and his eyes widened.

Sir Pentious, blood pulsing, heart pounding, smiled wickedly at the vulture, raised a finger shushingly to his lips, and then raised his gun.

###

Sir Pentious's criminal enterprises bolstered Basil Grace's business enterprises.

He threw his support behind more bandit raids.

And then led them.

And then consolidated this bandit gangs into a single corporation under his name.

And then merged Grace Firearms & Steel into his bandit empire.

And then Basil Grace's business enterprises bolstered Sir Pentious's criminal enterprises.

###

Nobody questioned Basil when he started producing new weapons based on his own blueprints.

Grace Firearms & Steel's factories were such byzantine industrial mazes spread out across enough different states that it was impossible for the average employee to keep track of everything produced in them. Even the workers, producing their parts on assembly lines, had little knowledge of what it was they were making. The very floor managers simply received their orders for parts and their instructions on where to send them next, at which point they were expected to burn their prior orders (a recent change in protocol) and pass the new ones on.

Thousands of people working in the cities—hundreds of them assigned to products that would never hit the legitimate market—and no one realizing the brand new blueprints for brilliant new guns they were currently working on were for imitation Gatling guns that shot a stream of cannon balls the size of a man's fist, or that what looked like an unusually long hunting rifle with a scope was actually the world's most precise sniper rifle to date, or that the chemicals they carefully mixed and sealed in canisters shaped roughly like fire hydrants could blow up three city blocks when dropped from the sky.

Until a few employees _did_ start realizing.

And so Grace Firearms & Steel also began manufacturing coffins and shovels.

By the time Grace Firearms & Steel acquired a shipyard and started producing the massive parts for airships, the workers tacitly understood that they were under new management.

###

"All right! All right," the mayor cried, red faced and sweating profusely, glancing back and forth between his daughter with a gloved hand clapped over her mouth, the gun pointing at her temple, and Sir Pentious's face. "Just—I'll talk, I'll talk to you. Tell me what it is you want."

"Your city."

The mayor choked on a laugh of shock; but it died as Sir Pentious's flying ship passed between the parlor window and the sun, casting a dark shadows into the room. "I-I can't give you a city. I'm an _elected official_ , I don't _own_ it—"

Sir Pentious laughed loudly, making the mayor's daughter flinch in his grip. "Oh, don't give me that! I've built towns around factories and mines too, I know that the man who owns the business owns the city. You never could have bought the election if you didn't already own half the land within town limits."

The mayor's face blanched. "Is this why you're—you're threatening me in my own home and h-holding my own daughter hostage? You take issue with my _politics?_ "

"Ha! My motives aren't so self-righteous. Let's be frank with each other: you're terrible, I'm worse, and I hold no grudge against you for it! In fact, I quite _approve_ of your politics, sir." Sir Pentious smiled crookedly. "I simply want what you have, that's all. You have a spectacular refinery here."

Voice trembling in fury and terror, the mayor said, "Then for God's sake, man, you have a floating abomination above the city, why don't you just _take_ it?! I don't have the power to stop you! Why do you have to torture my family first?!"

Sir Pentious considered that. "You make an excellent point." He looked at the mayor's daughter. "I suppose I don't need you." He fired a shot through her head, and then through the mayor's.

The daughter's body sagged in his arm, and he let it drop. It clattered unexpectedly when it hit the tile floor and Sir Pentious paused, giving it a second look. Oh, yes—he'd only passingly noticed when he'd come into the room, but she had an absurdly elaborate necklace: tiny red rubies, rose quartz cut in round cabochons and dangling tiny teardrops, set into a maze of delicate gold chains. The rose quartz cabochons formed the same star-like reflection as the star ruby brooch Helena so loved. And it was her favorite color.

Sir Pentious knelt down, twisted the necklace around on the young lady's neck, and tried to under the clasp. And tried again. And fiddled with it some more.

He tugged it taut against the young lady's neck to try to judge whether the opening was wide enough to squeeze around her chin and up over what was left of her head.

Then he lifted his head and yelled into the next room. "Oh, _Chessss!_ " Sir Pentious drew out his second-in-command's name in that way he hated so much. "Did you notice the wood-axe in the kitchen on the way in? How sharp was it?"

With the necklace in his hands and the blood polished off, Sir Pentious was still trying to get the clasp open when he was back on his airship. He hardly glanced out the nearest porthole as they dropped a bomb to destroythe railway track connecting the town to the nearest military base.

###

Helena gasped in amazement. "My word! It's practically _obscene!_ " she gushed. She took the necklace dangling from Basil's finger.

He'd chosen the right day to give it to her. The many rose quartz cabochons and teardrops matched the exact shade of the dress she was currently wearing.

She eagerly wrapped the necklace around her neck, fastened the clasp, and hurried to sit in front of the mirror to adjust it so that the lowest teardrop-shaped quartz hung along the center of her bosom. For a moment, Basil stood transfixed by the way her fingers manipulated the thin loops of chain dangling beneath the necklace; then he stepped up behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders, running his thumbs between her soft skin and her dress's lace collar. He leaned down, whispering in her ear, "How extraordinarily beautiful." He wasn't looking at the necklace.

"How many gemstones does this ridiculous thing have?" Helena tilted her chin up to get better light on the necklace so she could count.

Basil took advantage of the opportunity to nuzzle her uncombed curls aside with his nose, kiss her earlobe—she was wearing another of his recent gifts, earrings that each consisted of two star rubies dangling down from the earrings' hooks—and then kissed the side of her throat.

"Basil—" She laughed. "Darling, you're blocking—" Despite her protests, she reached up to run a hand through his long hair.

"Eighty-nine."

"Good heavens!"

"Including forty-two rubies—the tiny little accents between the larger quartz pieces—"

"Tiny or not, they're _rubies!_ "

"Well." Basil snuck another quick kiss in. "Probably rubies. I haven't exactly had it evaluated yet. Could be imitations—but they certainly _look_ like rubies, don't they?"

"I don't believe it." Helena laughed. "Which poor museum did you burgle this piece from?"

"No no no, don't you worry." Another kiss. "Not a museum." He slid his hands down to her elbows and crept across her waist.

Helena was silent a moment. "'Not a museum'?"

"Hm?"

"'Not a _museum_ ,' Basil?" She leaned away from him, putting her hands over his to stop their progress.

Basil froze. "Ah." He slowly straightened up, returning his hands to her shoulder. "Yes—You don't want the details."

"Basil!" Her hand flew to her chest, covering the lowest gems on the necklace. "But I'm _wearing_ it—!"

"It's nothing you need to worry about," he said quickly, "nobody's going to come after you for that necklace, I promise you." He hesitated. "Although it's a rather unique piece, isn't it? We _might_ want to get the stones rearranged so it isn't quite as recognizable—"

"That's my last concern!" Helena slid out from under his hands, hurrying to her feet and backing away from him. "Basil, tell me—tell me honestly—you didn't hurt anyone to get me this necklace, did you?"

"W—I—" Basil bit his lip, thinking back, trying to recall the exact chain of events. "No."

"You hesitated."

"I was _making sure._ No, I did not hurt anyone in order to get you that necklace."

Helena let out a long, shuddering sigh. "Good." She raised her hand to her forehead. "As... As long as nobody was harmed."

Basil winced. Could he pretend he hadn't heard that? With anyone else, yes—but it would eat him up inside with his wife. Delicately, he said, "I... didn't say there was _no harm_."

She shot him a look of horror.

He hastily continued before she could voice her protests: "Just that the harm wasn't to get the necklace. The—the harm was _completely_ separate, and the decision to get the necklace was made independently and subsequently—and she was _quite_ past sustaining any further harm at all by the time I took the necklace—"

Helena cried out in horror, grasping at the back of the necklace to try to get it off.

"I'm sorry—"

"Basil, I don't believe—!" Helena's fingers scrabbled at the clasp, and when it didn't come undone, grabbed the chain to try to jerk it free."

"Wait, let me—" Basil reached out to help.

Helena flinched and stumbled back, eyes wide with fear, one hand over her throat and the other raised to ward Basil off.

He froze.

Over the past few years as his ventures expanded outside of the law, he'd seen concern, yes; wariness, yes; she talked in vague, nervous ways about his latest exploits in the papers. She'd known he was Sir Pentious without his having to tell her. He had promised a thousand times in a thousand little ways that that would never follow him home—when he was home, he was only a husband and father, not a conqueror. She had accepted this, but even though she'd never quite shown it, he'd always known that on some level he could never fully reach, she had fear.

Until now, he'd thought she was afraid _for_ him.

He had never once given her a reason to be afraid of him. Never a threat, never a shout, never a raised hand—never the desire to do anything of the sort. So why? What had he done?

He felt sick.

He slowly lowed his hands, took a step back from Helena. "I'm only going to help." He kept his voice soft. "The clasp is—tricky. Funny story about that, actually, when I was trying to get..." He trailed off. "You're—probably not in the mood."

She hesitated, but nodded, turning away from him and lifting her curls off the back of her neck. Still moving slowly, he stepped up and fiddled with the finicky clasp. He could see Helena's shoulders tense.

"There." He held the ends until she grabbed the necklace, then stepped back again, letting her turn back around.

She couldn't meet his gaze. Instead, she stared down at the necklace and its eighty-nine gemstones. "You took this off a dead woman's neck, didn't you?"

Biting his lips together, Basil nodded.

Helena shook her head. "I don't... I don't want this in the house."

Basil nodded again.

"What else did you bring back?"

Basil's heart sank further. "Ah," he said. "I found a... There were some framed prints of animals in the study. One of them showed a mongoose fighting a snake." For reasons unfathomable to Basil, August had latched on to the mongoose as his favorite animal. He knew August didn't know he was Sir Pentious, but it still stung a little. August knew his papa had snakes decorating everything he owned. "So..."

"For _Auggie?_ You can't give that to him," Helena said, aghast.

"But he's turning eleven in just a few weeks!"

"And you'd give him a gift stolen from a dead family?!"

Well, when she put it _that_ way. "Well, _fine_ ," he said, trying not to sound petulant and not quite succeeding. He tried again and did a little better: "Fine. The next time I'm out for business, I'll find somewhere to sell them." The mongoose print would be worth nothing (except to Auggie, to whom it would have been priceless), but the necklace would fetch a fair price...

"No, don't—don't sell them. Return them to—whatever's left of the family, or—or sell them and donate the money, just... don't keep any of it. I don't want to profit from evil."

Basil laughed in disbelief. He hated how shrill his voice sounded. "We've _always_ profited from evil!" He couldn't believe Helena could suggest otherwise. "Every single last red cent in our treasury has been dyed in blood."

"It's _not_ —it doesn't have to be. We have more than enough to get by for the rest of our lives just on your family's money—"

"I'm _talking about_ my family's money," he hissed. "We sell guns. Guns! To British soldiers, to American soldiers— _both_ sides—to virtually every English-speaking white man on the planet, inside and outside the empire! What do you think our customers do with them? Who do you think they're aiming their guns at?"

A stricken look crossed her face. "I—I'd never really... thought about..." She sank down on the bed, her gaze far away as she turned over the implications in her mind.

God, she really hadn't, had she? He thought she'd been with him—fully aware, but feeling that the home with their son wasn't the place to talk about it. "You didn't need to think about it," he said grimly. "There's only three ways to handle having power and fortune bought with other people's lives." He counted them off on his fingers. "You can live ignorant of the evil that's propping you up; you can choose not to care about all those ignorant victims; or you can choose to give up all the benefits—the property, the riches, the _power_ —that can only come through evil."

Helena stared at him silently. The air hung heavy and chilly between them. "I've been living in ignorance?"

Basil winced. "I didn't mean—!" He buried his face in his hand. "Well...! I mean! If you didn't know, then, I suppose, by default...!"

"And which did you choose?"

"I made the decision not to care!"

Helena inhaled shortly and sharply; but a look in her eyes said that she'd known that answer was coming.

"Basil, you have the most brilliant mind in the world. You have to see that only one of those options is acceptable!"

"They're all viable options! Maybe only one of them is _good_ , but—but who decided that it's good to be good? It's a meaningless tautology!"

"It's not meaningless! It's certainly not meaningless to all the lives you've ruined and ended!"

"Which I have decided not to care about! You—you see how that problem solves itself?"

Helena stared at him, eyes wide and brows raised in stunned disbelief.

"No?" Basil asked.

"I don't like it," she said. "I—I want out of this."

"'This'?"

"Everything! Your crimes and your whole bloody inheritance. We'll find some other way—"

Aghast, Basil said, "We're talking about a _fortune_ —"

"Most families get by without a fortune! My family did!"

"You're talking about starting over with _nothing_. Even when we ran away, we were never that low."

Helena quailed for a moment; then rallied. "Yes," she said. "If we have to. We can start over."

"I—That—That's not—You can't—" Basil ran his fingers through his hair, trying to wrap his head around the thought of starting their whole lives over in their thirties with a son. "What about Auggie? His schooling? We'd never afford his school if we threw away everything we have. Especially if—" Basil scoffed, "—you expect me to find a job that pays _anything_ without taking advantage of anyone!"

Helena's expression hardened. "I do expect it," she snapped. "We'll make it work."

Basil clapped a hand over his mouth in horror. He took a moment to collect his nerves, then said, "You can't do that to Auggie. Helena, love, please—I only want the best for him, you _know_ that. I know that you do, too. With what we can give him now, he could do anything he wants. He could be a senator, an inventor—open up a whole zoo of mongeese—mongooses—?"

"Of course I want what's best for him!" Helena's voice was shaking. "And I want for him to be a good, noble citizen of the world! If he's raised in evil, how can he escape it when he grows up? A—apparently _you_ didn't!"

"I didn't want to!"

Helena flinched. Basil hasn't meant for that to be an attack. He hurried on, "But we could raise him to want to, if you want. I don't want him to have to grow up with guilt on his conscience because of his father, but—but I'm sure we can find a way to raise him toward good while gradually introducing him to the truth about his heritage?"

Helena shook her head. "No. No, that's not good enough anymore, Basil." 

"But we can't just tear up his life!"

"We have no choice! I'm _sure_ of it! I've decided!"

" _You've_ decided?! I don't get to decide too?! He's as much my son as he is yours!"

Helena opened her mouth, but said nothing; but Basil saw the look of horror on her face as she realized what she'd been about to say. As deeply as it pierced his heart, she might as well have said it out loud. She might as well have slapped him in the face.

His knees almost buckled. He sank into the nearest chair. "Right," he murmured. "Yes, of course."

"I didn't... I would never say..." But her protests died quickly.

Basil realized then that she was going to leave him.

She may not have made the decision yet. It might not have even occurred to her. But he was as sure of it as if he'd seen her walking out the door with a bag in each hand. She was going to leave him because she was afraid of him.

"You know I'd never hurt you," he said softly. "You or August. For any reason, ever."

Helena nodded woodenly.

"We can find a better way to keep my business separate from our family. No presents, for starters."

The could talk this out, he was sure they could talk this out—they talked everything else out.

But she just nodded again, silent.

He didn't know how to reach her.

"We'll—we'll work it out. We'll talk about it later," he said. "Promise?"

He waited.

She swallowed, nodded, and whispered, "I promise."

###

She left during his next trip away from home. When evening fell and he hadn't received her customary daily telegram, he knew. He rushed back to Philadelphia.

The house was dark and still. The trunk and bags she'd brought with her from England when they'd eloped were gone. Auggie's room looked barren without his clothes and favorite toys. She'd taken every dress in their shared wardrobe—including Basil's, probably by accident, the sole dress he'd brought from his past life in his childhood home as a sentimental souvenir.

But she'd left every piece of jewelry she owned on their bed.

The ruby brooch. The earrings with their double ruby pendants. The damned necklace with its eighty-nine gemstones.

Her snake-shaped wedding ring.

###

That night, Philadelphia learned that Sir Pentious commanded an army.

Three airships approached the city—no more than one had ever been seen at a time, no more than one had ever been known to exist—and devastated the train lines out of town. Hundreds of masked men and women poured across the city in a wave—by dawn, it had become thousands—storming into homes and businesses, carrying weapons that effortlessly shattered even the heaviest doors, searching for... no one knew what. Some of Sir Pentious's forces looted, but so infrequently and erratically they seemed to be mere crimes of opportunity rather than the criminal mastermind's orders. Some left behind injuries, but no one was killed. The masked bandits received more shots than they fired. They wore armor frighteningly efficient at stopping bullets. The raid lasted two nights and ended just as abruptly as it had begun, with no evident change in Sir Pentious's fortunes nor any apparent objective achieved.

Nobody knew what Sir Pentious had wanted. The national opinion was that it had been a show of force, proof that far more than isolated industrial facilities to the west and south were worthy targets. If he could strike in Philadelphia, he could strike anywhere.

Helena had never gone into theater, but she had always been an actress. She could change her voice at will, create her own costumes; although she didn't wear makeup as a habit, Basil had no doubt she'd learned how to use it to change her appearance. If she changing her husband's sex in the eyes of the world by modifying a corset and tailoring a coat wasn't impressive enough, she could affect far more significant changes on her own appearance. If she was determined to disappear, Basil would never see her or August again.

He'd had to try anyway.

He'd failed.

On the dawn of the third morning since her disappearance, Sir Pentious sat alone on the staircase in his empty home, sobbing so hard he shook.

Chess sat beside him, wrapped an arm around his shoulders, and held him upright.

Sir Pentious didn't stop sobbing until his chest and throat hurt and his tears had long run dry.

###

A letter published on the front page of the United States' five largest newspapers in 1877:

"My dear shining angels,

"In the coming months, it's going to get so much worse. You might blame yourself. You might wonder if I am doing all of this to punish you for leaving, or to force you to come back. And so, on my knees, I plead with you not to carry any guilt or shame for my actions: I swear, from the bottom of my heart, I'm not doing this to hurt you. I would never and will never do anything to hurt you. I'm doing this because I want to.

"So to you—and you alone, love—I offer this as a reassurance.

"To everyone else, I offer this as a warning.

"Ever yours,

"Sir Pentious"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Insert a ton of historical notes here on some other day lmao.
> 
> Posts for this fic available on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/625136213499789312/basilisk-in-the-grass-ch-3-of-4-fall) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/ckret2/status/1289084671817650176?s=20) (after spending half an hour trying to get a single post and a single tweet to upload, wtf is up with my computer these last couple days, it's acting like it's more sleep deprived than _I_ am.) I'm proud of this chapter! Let me know what y'all think!


	4. Death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final chapter!! Here we GO! Written for (yesterday's) Day 5 of Pentious Week: "Sir Pentious Fucking Dies P.2"!

There were multiple families of minor British nobility and vaguely wealthy landowners who went by the name "Grace." Most such families could trace their surname back to France, where the surname meant the same thing in French that it does in English.

Tracing Basil Grace's pedigree back, though, one would find that his surname was purely British. A few generations back, the family's surname was instead written "in Grace"—a common enough preposition at the time, back when surnames were place names instead of family names and you'd frequently find people named "in—" or "of—" before the name of the town they hailed from. And so, at one point, it seemed, the family must have come from a place named "Grace."

Or some variation on the word. A few generations before that, their name had used another way to spell Grace in Middle English, "in Gras," before the spelling was standardized.

Except, in this case, it had been standardized the wrong way, because in Middle English _gras_ was a shared way to spell two very different words. Keep following the family tree back, and in Old English the ancestors of what would become the Grace family used "in Græs," and _græs_ does not mean _grace_. Far enough back, locals of the area were referred to as living "in þæm græse."

Translated directly into modern English, it did not mean "Grace." It meant "in the grass." A reference to the rolling meadow along one side of what was now the Grace estate.

It was also a perfectly fitting name for a man who was indeed turning out to be a snake in the grass.

###

Sir Pentious looked down from the airship at the burnt up clearing below.

He and Helena had always maintained two homes. Old habits from England; he'd been too used to the Graces' separate townhouse and country house. His little house in Maine, near the coast and surrounded by trees, was unknown to anyone in the world but the Grace family and a handful of former servants that Sir Pentious had preemptively executed to ensure they never worked out who their former employer was.

He had long ago concluded that if Helena was ever going to try to contact him again, it would be either at their old home in Philadelphia or at this lonely country house. A couple of times a year, he visited this house alone and on foot to search the dusty rooms for any notes that might have been left for him.

When he'd visited a couple of weeks ago, he'd found the house populated by a posse of men waiting with guns and handcuffs.

"So that's that," Chess said, looking down at the pile of burnt lumber. "Now we know."

Sir Pentious nodded grimly. "Now we know." He'd feared for years that Helena might go to law enforcement with her knowledge of Sir Pentious. Sure, there was a slim chance that he'd been followed on a prior visit to the house, or maybe the man who'd sold them the land nearly twenty years ago had suddenly and miraculously realized that the face of the man who'd bought it was the same one he'd seen in the papers... But Sir Pentious was sure that wasn't it. He was sure it was Helena.

And if she wanted to see him stopped so badly that was telling his secrets...

Helena was the only person in the world who knew Sir Pentious's most carefully kept secret. If she ever told that one, it would be over. Many of his lowest laborers were kept in place out of fear, but for many more the narrow-minded resignation of "it's not so bad for me" was all that was keeping them in place. And those who worked for him more directly and held real power in his organization—greedy businessmen, decorated military officers, crooked politicians, sadistic mass murderers, competent middle-managing bandits, wives poached from the powerful—they rallied around him out of a mix of personal ambition and respect. Despite its democratic ideals, America was a true child of the British Empire: full of power-hungry bigots eager to steal from the rest of the world.

There would always be people here willing to follow a megalomaniacal man with his own war machines.

War machines or not, fewer would follow an insane crossdressing woman. That would be what they'd see. It wouldn't completely destroy his empire—not immediately—but it would disgust many into leaving and undermine his authority with a vast majority of the rest. Maybe it could even help rally international furor against him, he didn't know.

How far was Helena willing to go to stop him?

Chess asked, "She wasn't there, was she?"

"No. I made sure." After he'd lured the posse into chasing him into the woods and picked them off one by one (never bring a gunfight to a gunsmith), he'd dragged their bodies back to the house, searched it top to bottom, and called out a warning in every room—and only then had he burned the house to the ground.

Chess nodded. "About ready to give up on them?" He tapped a finger on the ruby brooch pinned to Sir Pentious's ascot. A few months after Helena's disappearance, he'd started wearing her jewelry: her brooch in the center of his chest, her wedding ring beneath his glove, her earrings in his newly-pierced ears.

Sir Pentious slapped Chess's hand away as if the ruby Chess was prodding was a big red self-destruct button. "That's one of the few things I don't have power over," he snapped. Someday he might give up, but he didn't think he could ever move on. Maybe someday he'd love someone else enough to want a life with them, sure, it was possible; but he was never going to love them the same way he would always love Helena.

And how could he trust anyone else that much? How could he risk exposing himself fully in front of someone new?

Anyway, he was forty now. Maybe the age didn't mean much to Chess—he was almost ten years Sir Pentious's junior—but Sir Pentious could feel that he was too old to be looking for new love.

Chess stepped away from the window. "Well," he said. "If that ever changes, you know where I am."

As Chess walked away, Sir Pentious wondered what if he'd really meant that the way Sir Pentious thought he had.

###

Sir Pentious beamed at the fearful, glowering men filling the rows of desks on front of him. "Gentlemen of the state legislature!" he said, holding out his arms grandly. The young Burmese python draped around his shoulders shifted to keep its balance. "I'm _so_ honored you made time to meet with me on such short notice." Not that they'd had much choice in the matter. Sir Pentious had simply waltzed into the room, and then his gun-wielding followers had filled all the exits.

"What do you think you're doing here?!" A representative in the front row of seats demanded, lunging to his feet.

Ten guns trained on him. He sat back down.

"I'm here to negotiate, of course!" Sir Pentious paced in front of the representatives' seats, enjoying how the sound of his footsteps on the wooden floor echoed in the deathly silent chamber. "I assume you called this secret midnight meeting to discuss the hostage situation I've presented you with? It's not like you're going to get all your little ones back _without_ my participation."

"You're a sick bastard," another of the representatives called from the back of the room—but he had the sense to stay in his seat. "This is beyond the most depraved acts of war! What kind of a man kidnaps thousands of children as a negotiation tactic?!"

"A craven coward, I'm sure," Sir Pentious said, offering a hand to help support his python as it stretched curiously toward one of the representatives. "But a _very_ well-organized one."

A third representative roared, "You'll burn in hell for this!" and pounded on his desk. The thunderous pound set off someone's itchy trigger finger; a bullet hit the representative in the chest. His suit and flaked off in black ashes and greenish vapor rose out of his chest as the chemical compound in the bullet splashed out into his flesh. As the men nearest the dead representative gasped in horror and bolted out of their seats to get away from the corpse, Sir Pentious raised a hand to signal his followers to hold their fire

Wryly, Sir Pentious said, "And when I get there, if the devil's got any common sense, he'll offer me a seat at his court." He laughed wryly. "So about those children? And the terms I've demanded to ensure their continued safety?"

The men glared silently at Sir Pentious.

They'd crack. He was patient. "Show of hands, how many of my hostages were fathered by someone in here? I think some of you are even _grand_ fathers!"

"And you are clearly _not_ , sir," the representative in the back called, his voice shaking with anger but forced to remain low and even, his fists balled up on the top of his desk. "Or else you wouldn't dare be so mocking of the love we have for our families."

Sir Pentious sneered at the representative. How desperately he wanted to tell these arrogant men that he knew that love—probably better than any of the men here did, whom he would bet had never once dressed or bathed any of their own children.

Because what if he _did_ admit to having a family—what if the public learned that he too had hostages that could be taken?

Sometimes he was tempted to confess, for entirely selfish reasons; if half of America was trying to find Sir Pentious's family to try to use them against him, eventually they'd have to find Helena and August, wouldn't they? He would happily trade the thousands of children he currently held hostage in order to see his wife and child again—in order to learn what his now-teenage son looked like.

But in order for that to happen, Helena and Auggie would have to be used as hostages. Sir Pentious would never let that happen to them.

"No mockery is intended, _sir_ ," Sir Pentious snapped. "On the contrary, I have the _greatest_ respect for the love of a father toward his children. Which is why I know what an effective motivator it can be."

"Then what you respect is these men's fear," snapped the representative in the front row. He twisted around to look at the rest of legislature. "We're not cowards! You've seen the terms he's demanding in return for your children's continued safety—it's tantamount to enslaving our entire state! We must refuse his terms." There were gasps. "Losing those children is nothing compared to losing our collective freedom!"

There were shouts of outrage. Over the anarchy, another representative cried out, "Damn you, man, what do you know? You don't have any children of your own!"

"Is that so," Sir Pentious muttered, opening his coat to pick through the array of guns he had holstered at his hip. He slid out the large one with a lightning bolt-shaped serpent painted onto its rubber grip.

"Which is why I'm the only one who can consider the matter with a clear head! The rest of you would betray millions of citizens for one child—"

Halfway clicking down the trigger on Sir Pentious's pistol fired a sharp dart into the representative's head, with a long braided gold wire connecting the dart to the gun. Pulling the trigger the rest of the way cause a crackling, screeching lightning bolt to convulse around the wire. The overcooked representative fell from his seat, corpse still twitching.

Sir Pentious let up on the trigger, pulled a switch on the top of the gun to reel in the wire—it easily detached from the dart now that the electricity had burned through the adhesive holding it to the wire—and stopped when a couple of inches were hanging from the tip of the barrel. He pulled another dart from an inner coat pocket and peeled off the layer of paper protecting the adhesive on its back end from the air. Nodding to the dead representative, Sir Pentious said, "If he doesn't have a dog in this fight, I don't think he should get a vote. Do you?"

No one argued.

Once he'd pressed the wire into the adhesive and reeled the new dart fully into the barrel, he looked around the room again. "Let's get down to business."

Later, as the haggard representatives filed by the desk Sir Pentious had claimed, one by one adding their signatures to the treaty he'd drafted up, he smirked up at their furious faces. "I seem to recall that around the time I moved to your country, your state was furious about a little war you'd just lost because you _wanted_ to leave the Union to enslave people? And look!" He gestured at the treaty. "I'm even expanding the enslavement to the rest of the population! You should be thrilled!"

Several men looked like they'd rather like to strangle Sir Pentious. The armed bodyguards standing at his shoulders dissuaded them.

"And you talk about maintaining your state's freedoms." Sir Pentious laughed wheezily, almost like a hiss. He laced his hands under his chin, and his python eagerly wove between his wrists. "Most of you lot are fine with the worst things imaginable happening to people, just as long as it's _other_ people. That's really the only difference between your preferred brand of tyranny and mine, you know. I'm no worse than you—I just realized that _everyone_ is 'other people.'"

###

Sir Pentious found it easiest to act not as a conqueror but as a bully. Although he planned to fully conquer the east coast soon enough, for the moment he held full control of very little territory; the more turf he actually claimed as his ome the more people and resources he'd have to expend to control it. Instead, he'd become an expert at twisting the arms of quite a few cities and even states into turning their industries toward his purposes. In return for their resources, he didn't blow them up in their homes—and he even paid them for their services the way any nation would pay to receive another nation's exports. Because by now, as far as he was concerned, his airships _were_ a nation in the sky. And despite holding so little land, his nation hung heavily in the air over America like thick thunderclouds waiting to unleash a downpour.

The threat of a coming storm was heavy enough that even other nations feared the flashes of lightning. Sir Pentious heartily encouraged the United States' northern and southern neighbors to deal with their fear by minding their own damn business, muchas gracias and merci beaucoup. Europe, farther removed from his threat, was less easily cowed. After Sir Pentious put a bottleneck on trade moving in and out of New York, Queen Victoria finally decided to get involved, issuing a dire warning to to "Sir" Pentious—"Whom I am quite sure I never knighted"—that a vast Royal Navy force would be on New York's shores in under a week.

In two days, distant spots like glinting stars in the sky appeared at dawn to the west of England. By late morning, thirty airships were arrayed up and down the United Kingdom's west coast, looming heavy and threatening in the sky, letting the cities on the coast of Scotland, England, and Wales get their first good look at what it was that cast such a heavy shadow over the United States. Like ships more massive than any the Royal Navy had ever built, sealed all over like submarines, hanging in the air as though they were made of cloud instead of iron and steel. They stayed above the coast all day, safely out of range of the few desperate bullets and cannonballs fired in their direction, and more than long enough for authorities up and down the coast to collate their stories and get an accurate count of exactly how many ships darkened their coast.

A single ship moved inland—faster than anyone imagined such a massive craft could ever move—to reach London and hover over Buckingham Palace.

And there they remained all day, hovering in the exact same spots, as the massive shadows the sun cast beneath them moved across the ocean and over the coastal cities they menaced.

As the sun was setting, making the ships appear to be black holes in the sky, each one fired ten rockets—a total of three hundred. They made a screaming, wailing, whistling noise, and they trailed bright white lights and sparks behind them as they flew.

Two hundred and ninety of the missiles splashed into the Strait of Dover and the North Sea, along Great Britain's east coast—crossing the entirety of the island, one coast to the other. Where they splashed down into the sea, they remained floating, allowing terrified citizens on the east coast see just how easily they could have fallen a mile short and landed on their homes.

The remaining ten landed on the island, in areas sparsely populated but within easy sight of passing railways, demonstrating the enormous size of the craters they left behind.

No airships ever made landfall; no communications were ever exchanged between any of the crew and the British government. The next morning, the airships were gone. 

The Royal Navy never appeared in New York.

###

The flight back across the Atlantic was marked by raucous celebrations. It was as if they'd won a war against the British Empire without having to fight it.

Along the sides of each airship were strips of lights used to communicate with neighboring airships in morse—red lights to indicate dashes, white lights for dots, dark to divide letters, two dark for spaces between words—with broad ledges beneath the lights to shield them from people on the ground. On the way home, one airship sarcastically flashed, using up all fifty lights at once, "GODSAVETHEQUEEN". Several other ships took up the slogan. One retorted, "FUCK THE QUEEN".

Sir Pentious flashed his lights red on and off for a minute to call the other ships' attention, then asked, "STATUS? SP"

One ship cheerily announced, "3 SHEETS 2 WIND" and another concurred, "BLOOTERED". Another couple added "OLL KORRECT" and most of the rest chimed in "OK" or "3S2W". One, confused, simply said "YES".

"Cheers to that," Chess muttered, tipping the glass he'd brought with him to the communications room toward one of the windows.

Sir Pentious couldn't fault them; his ship was partying, too. They'd just cowed the most powerful empire on the planet. It didn't necessarily mean they'd have been able to win against England in open warfare—they were, at a minimum, still severely outgunned—but it meant they were intimidating enough that England didn't even want to try. Even Sir Pentious had downed a bottle of Vin Mariani Bordeaux, pulled back his hair in a ribbon, taken off his hat, and monologued out his whole plot to conquer North America to the hat as if the hat was the helpless American president held hostage in Sir Pentious's constrictive grasp. The equally ecstatic crew had cheered on his dramatic performance.

So if the other ships wanted to celebrate, let them. Sir Pentious simply advised them, "KEEP HELM SOBER". He received several variations on "YES SIR" and "OK BOSS", a couple of "DAMN", and a single "BOO HISS".

Chess bent down and started tapping out a message on their modified typewriter keyboard, glancing up to check the meter indicating how many lights the message would use so far.

"Come on, Chess," Sir Pentious said; and when Chess continued tapping, he dragged it out in that way Chess hated, " _Chhesssss—_ "

"You sound like a leaking pipe." Satisfied with his message, Chess tapped the button to send it to their lamps: "CHEERS! CC". Chess left the keyboard. "Okay, I'm all yours."

"Good! Just how I prefer you." Sir Pentious flung an arm around Chess's shoulders and dragged him down the narrow, mahogany-paneled hall. "I need to talk with you about New Orleans. With New York cut off, it should be easy enough to block Baltimore and Philly's ports as well—"

"Are we still going to attempt that instant cement dam on the Delaware River?"

"Yes! Yes, yes, I can't wait! But New _Orleans_ —we don't have a plan for them yet. Of all the southern ports, I'm most worried about them. Come to my quarters, we can work on a plan. I've got so many maps it's practically indecent—"

Chess reached across Sir Pentious to grab his shoulder, turned them to face each other, and pulled him in.

Sir Pentious leaned into the kiss with a burst of warmth in his chest and stomach. He grabbed Chess's collar while he got his bearings—it had been _years_ —and then he shoved Chess against the wall, hungrily pressing as hard as he could into the kiss. Chess's hands slid to Sir Pentious's sides; he could barely feel the impression of Chess's touch beneath the leather corset and padding that disguised his real anatomy.

Terror jolted Sir Pentious like lightning shooting along his spine and lancing his heart. He shoved off the wall, stumbling back. "Good Lord!" He covered his mouth. "What's come over me?"

Chess blinked, dazed. "What—?"

"And you! That was..." Sir Pentious warred over words for a moment. " _Incredibly_ impolite!"

"I—I'm sorry. I didn't..." Chess swallowed hard. "We are... each other's closest confidants. The sort of... intimacy you've shown me— I thought that we—that you..."

He did. That was the awful thing. He _did_.

Over the years, it had crept up on him and taken him by surprise. Perhaps because it had been so gradual; perhaps because it was so different from how he'd loved Helena; perhaps because the sort of desire he felt for men was so infrequent and complicated compared to the desire he felt for women; perhaps because he'd instinctively known it couldn't happen.

But he _did_ want it. Chess was a clever thinker and a careful planner and as callous as Sir Pentious, and there was no one else Sir Pentious could trust with his greatest ambitions and his darkest wishes. And Sir Pentious wanted more from him than the relationship of a dictator and his top officer.

He couldn't, though.

For a hundred reasons. Because he was afraid of what would happen if his followers found out—lawbreakers though they all were, they weren't universally accepting of relationships between two men. Because he'd never tried to figure out what Chess would think if he found out what was underneath Sir Pentious's clothes. Because he had spent twenty years working every single day to be a man; but if they were naked in front of each other, Sir Pentious was terrified that he wouldn't know how to get through the act feeling like anything but a woman being fucked by a man—and if that was what he was made to feel like, he didn't know how he could undo the damage to himself.

It was all _fear_. Sir Pentious despised fear—for a moment he almost despised himself for feeling it. But he had worked for too hard and too long to become exactly who he wanted to be. He'd never risk that.

"We can't. _I_ can't," Sir Pentious said. "It's... it's no proper way for two gentlemen to behave."

Chess's eyes widened. "That's it?"

Sir Pentious shook his head and turned away.

Chess seized Sir Pentious's hand before he could go. "If it wasn't improper— _would_ you? If we lived in another world—or another time—the Greece of antiquity..."

When had Chess read enough poetry to know that reference? He'd come so far from the young factory worker Sir Pentious had only narrowly spared.

Sir Pentious met his eyes and squeezed his hand. "If this were Greece, Patroclus."

Chess gave Sir Pentious a watery smile and let go.

And Sir Pentious walked away quickly, feeling hollow and sick.

###

Sir Pentious's name was a curse in the mouths of every clergyman, every noble and politician, and every common citizen across three continents; but his relationship with newspapers was gold. Sir Pentious and the press loved each other. (He loved the press, anyway. He wasn't sure if the love was mutual—but when he needed to make a national announcement, papers quite obligingly printed it on his behalf; and he was always deeply flattered by the nasty things they wrote about him.)

When one bold journalist had called out him as he exited a very lopsided treaty meeting and said that his enemies were calling him a far worse tyrant than Napoleon, Genghis Khan, or Julius Caesar, and did he have any comment on that—Sir Pentious had retorted that he wasn't a _worse tyrant_ , he was a _superior villain_.

The next day, newspaper headlines read "SIR PENTIOUS THE 'SUPER-VILLAIN'".

He embraced the title "supervillain" for the rest of his life.

###

Chess's hand was clutching the bloody stain spreading across his waistcoat as Sir Pentious, his revolver's barrel still smoking, knelt down beside him. Chess managed to focus on Sir Pentious's face. "You didn't use... one of the fancy guns?" His blood seeped into the cracks of the airship helm's floorboard.

"I wanted to leave you alive long enough to talk," Sir Pentious said. He slid an arm under Chess's shoulders and helped him sit half upright—more roughly than was necessary, but more gently than anyone else in Chess's position would have received. "Why attempt a mutiny?"

Chess started to shrug but winced in pain. "I wanted what you've got," he said. "The kingdom, the army, the ships..."

"You would have had it! Once I had the world, I would have named you my successor! No one else is fit to the position."

"Too long to wait." Chess tried to grin. "You're probably gonna live a hundred years. Men in my family die young. Couldn't risk it."

Sir Pentious sighed. "I understand." He had the same greedy ambitions. He would have done the same. "I'll hold no hard feelings toward your memory."

"Nor toward you," Chess said.

Sir Pentious bent down and gave Chess one last farewell kiss.

Then held the revolver to Chess's head and fired two shots.

###

Sir Pentious was single-handedly fighting a war against the entire United States, and oil was what kept the war machine blazing hot. Oil kept his airships in the sky where they belonged. He held control of every oil field of any note in the country, and as long as he did, he was king.

But because of that, his oil fields were his biggest weakness. Without them, he wasn't flying; and without flight, he had no military. He didn't have a cavalry he didn't have a navy. He had some impressive designs for trackless trains that could steamroll most battlefields, but trains could be stopped. He knew his biggest advantage was flight.

If some of his enslaved laborers got a rebellion organized—if some of his loyal followers were double agents or got bought out... All they would have to do was open the gates to the United States' scattered military forces. What would Sir Pentious do if they made it onto his oil field? Blow the whole thing up? Whether he let them take it or destroyed it so they couldn't have it, that dried up one of the tributaries feeding his river of oil. He couldn't afford to lose many fields before he wasn't producing enough oil to slake his airships' constant thirst.

However, a few years ago he'd made a discovery that changed everything:

There was oil under the ocean. In the Gulf of Mexico.

For the past few years—around seizing states, kidnapping children, intimidating the queen, feeding resistance leaders' legs to his python, et cetera—he had gradually designed and constructed the machinery he would need to establish an artificial island over several off-shore oil sites, drill deep enough to reach them, and create artificial whirlpools to serve like a moat miles around the artificial islands to ensure no navy could ever get close enough to disrupt their operations. With oil fields in the ocean, his airships would never need to make landfall again.

Progress had slowed down since losing Chess—it was so hard to find good, competent officers to delegate tasks to—but it hadn't stopped. The pieces for the off-shore island had been assembled; they just needed to be flown out to the ocean, dropped in place, anchored down, and fitted to each other. After that, the drilling could start.

And then the world would be his to ravage and conquer at his leisure.

Nothing would stand in his way

###

So it was no surprise that this was when the States tried to launch their most well-coordinated assassination attempt yet. Sir Pentious knew his ranks were constantly bleeding turncoats—when his modus operandi was "pure, unadulterated evil," the people who joined him with the justification of "he's done some bad things but he's not _that_ bad" eventually found that he was, in fact, that bad—and he didn't have the slightest idea how many spies had been slid into his ranks. Even if the bigwigs hadn't heard his full plan yet, they had to know that something was about to happen that was very bad for the rest of the planet.

And so it was that during a visit to one of his "boutique factories"—a smaller, more intimate facility where, instead of simply shipping blueprints to be constructed, he came down himself to build and test them himself—a gunfight broke out.

Their choice of battlefield made sense. The workshops in these boutique factories were some of the only places Sir Pentious made landfall where he wasn't surrounded at all times by a phalanx of bodyguards and steel. They were also, by necessity, filled with a fair amount of unskilled and semi-skilled laborers, which meant Sir Pentious couldn't personally vet everyone who came in. The States had probably slipped a multitude of potential assassins into several factories to wait for Sir Pentious's arrival.

But he didn't think his assassins had accounted for the fact that these boutique factories were where Sir Pentious worked on the really wild shit.

Reports passed through the pipes that served to carry voices from one side of the facility to the other. Workers harriedly listed six intruders; very highly trained; well-armed; easily disarming, disabling, or destroying any resistance. These were no fresh-faced army recruits. They were using weapons of Sir Pentious's design—not Grace guns, the _new_ stuff, the things that spat lightning and fire. They wore suits that clanked like they'd been lined on the inside with steel plates; they hid their faces with low bowler hats and black bandannas. They communicated with code names; three were going by Panther, Bear, and Elephant, the other three unknown. This was a step up from John Wilkes Booth. Wonderful. The previous assassination attempts against Sir Pentious had ended a little less _sic semper tyrannis_ and a little more _semper tyrannis_ ; he would deal with this attempt the same way.

He instructed his workers to make like they were trying to defend the path to workshop three but to let the intruders slip past them. Sir Pentious would be waiting for them in workshop three.

Along with his newest toy.

Four stories tall with walkways criss-crossing around each of its joints, atop a metal arm that would soon be attached beneath an airship, with three elbows to let it contort and flex in any direction—the toy was crowned by a glass cockpit and a fabulous new gun that combined all of Sir Pentious's favorite features of a Gatling gun with those of a shotgun: it fired five times per second, and each shot had a dozen pellets. It went through a lot of ammo, very fast. And it was extremely fun to play with.

The first assassin through the door was shredded into ribbons as he cackled in delight. He hoped it was Elephant, he'd always kind of wanted to hunt an elelphant.

The five survivors were smarter; they split up, found different entrances on different floors, came through at the same time, made him pick who to fire at. The controls on the arm, Sir Pentious noted, weren't responsive enough for this kind of combat. For sweeping a long arc to flatten buildings or to mow through an entire line of soldiers at once, it would be fine—but trying to aim at individual targets darting back and forth on multi-level walkways was next to impossible. Particularly when its arms were ringed by walkways that Sir Pentious kept having to account for and contort around like an arboreal snake weaving around branches. But fine; it was next to impossible for the assassins to hit him, too. Most of their shots flew wild past his ever-moving cockpit, and the few that hit only cracked the glass.

He caught one assassin's leg, decided that he could put that wounded animal out of its misery later, and paused to add another belt of shotgun ammo to the gun. Which was when he spotted another assassin, standing on a third story walkway not twenty feet away from the cockpit's current position, gun pointed straight at him, arms trembling.

His gray suit was already stained with blood, clearly he wasn't afraid to take a life. A case of the nerves, maybe? Overawed by the lead-spitting serpent? He wouldn't be Sir Pentious's first victim to stare in dumb shock at his doom. Grinning wickedly, Sir Pentious twisted the cockpit around to face him. The assassin jolted, holding his gun tighter, but still couldn't fire.

From a lower level, voice taking on a metallic echo as it traveled through the partially-open machinery in the bottom of the cockpit, one of the other assassins shouted, "What are you doing?! Take the shot, Mongoose!"

Sir Pentious's finger froze on the trigger.

"Hold on!" The assassin's voice was younger than Sir Pentious had expected. "Just—let me—"

"Now's not the _time_ , Gus!"

Sir Pentious gasped. Unthinking, he flung open the cockpit's door, stood, and asked—voice barely above a hissing, hopeful whisper—"Son?"

The assassin flinched; then slowly holstered his gun, pulled down his bandana, and took off his bowler hat. Curly brown hair pulled in a loose ponytail tumbled out of his hat.

Sir Pentious seized his shirt over his heart. "Oh, my God."

He'd be twenty-one now. Almost twenty-two. Had he ended up here because he'd become a soldier? A police officer? A professional hit man? Look at him—all grown up, a little boy's face resculpted into a man's. Look at him—he still wore his hair as long as he could. He must have picked that up from Sir Pentious. His hair curled like his mother's.

Sir Pentious leaped from the cockpit down to the third story walkways and headed for August.

How much had Helena told August over the years? (How was Helena? Was she well? Was she still embroiled in the fight against Sir Pentious, or had she shared all she knew with the authorities and returned to a normal life?) Had she ever told him that Sir Pentious wasn't the man who'd fathered him—had she wanted him to distance himself that far from the Grace bloodline? Had she told him the truth about Basil Grace's history? Had Helena ever remarried? Had they replaced him—?

When Sir Pentious finally stopped—still five feet away, afraid to get closer, as if August would be exposed as an illusion if he got near enough to see the details—August smiled, chin trembling and eyes watering, and said, "Hey, papa."

Sir Pentious's breath caught in his throat. "Oh, August! My Auggie!" Tears spilled down his cheeks even as a smile stretched across his face. "You're taller than me! You've... come to help your old man conquer the world?"

"I'm here to stop you." August's voice was thick. "I hope you'll come with me. Peacefully."

"Of course you do." In his heart Sir Pentious had never believed otherwise. He brushed the tears off his face, still shakily smiling. "You must know I won't."

August nodded in resignation, biting his lips.

"Look at you. Fighting evil!" Sir Pentious laughed weakly. What now? He couldn't fire on his own son. "Your mother must be so pr—"

A shot rang out. August recoiled so hard that for a split second of terror Sir Pentious was sure that he'd just been shot by his own allies. Then Sir Pentious felt the pain just beneath his collarbone.

A second shot. Sir Pentious felt it enter upwards through his back near his spine.

August screamed something Sir Pentious couldn't understand and reached for him.

Sir Pentious waved him him away. "Stay back," he ordered. At least he hoped he did. He couldn't hear his own voice. "If you value your survival, _stay back!_ " He clapped a hand over the wound in his chest, then slid it over on top of his star ruby brooch.

The corset that Helena had made to help Sir Pentious disguise his anatomy had worn out years ago. He'd replaced it with one of his own design, carefully shaped out of leather and hardened into a near-inflexible layer of armor. Although the armor clearly wasn't bulletproof; it hadn't stopped the bullets from piercing him, just slowed them down enough that they lodged inside his chest instead of coming out the other sides.

The surface of the leather was ornately decorated with curves and swirls of leaves and flowers; embedded down the front of the leather armor and along a pair of long underpants attached to it were an array of star rubies and star rose quartzes, plucked from Helena's necklace and other jewelry and meticulously incorporated into the most important piece of his wardrobe.

The leather corset still helped flatten his breasts, but also was shaped to resemble faux pectoral muscles . It still had padding around the waist to straighten out his curves, but also curved down in front of his pelvis to add another layer of padding over his groin.

All of the padding in his corset was stuffed tight with gunpowder. Every single gem and jewel on his body, even his double-ruby earrings, held a tiny explosive within their gold mountings.

Sir Pentious twisted his left thumb between his fingers to press on the ruby-eyed snake wedding ring beneath his glove and simultaneously pressed his right hand onto his ruby brooch.

There was no getting out of this. If these wounds didn't kill him, they'd arrest him and treat him in captivity. Either way, this was the end of his empire. He'd decided a long time ago that he'd rather die as a notorious man than live as an imprisoned woman. They'd never take him alive.

The double triggers under his ring and brooch set off a trail of static sparks along three golden wires. Fire blazed along his sides and groin, then up and down his chest and legs.

Whatever they retrieved of his corpse for autopsy, all the flesh in his groin, lower abdomen, and chest would be incinerated beyond any identification. He'd read enough news articles about men like him who had been stripped in prison or examined after death and had their deepest secret trumpeted to the world. Like hell was he going to let history remember him as anybody but _Sir_ Pentious.

He heard a distant explosion, couldn't feel his legs, and tumbled back against the walkway railing. Bigger than he'd expected. Hellfire covered his vision and filled his nostrils. Had August backed away?

Sir Pentious grabbed the railing, with his last strength heaved his hips up onto it, and tumbled backwards headfirst.

His last thought was of his son, standing too close the last time Sir Pentious had been able to see him.

He hadn't meant for the bomb to be that strong, he hadn't meant for the flames to spread out so far—please, don't let him have killed his family.

Please.

###

**EPILOGUE**

###

When he died, he was still falling.

And when he woke back up, he was still falling.

A sea of red flashed around him in every direction. He landed on his head, lay stunned in a crumpled pile for a minute, then slowly disentangled himself from himself and pushed himself up onto his elbows.

He couldn't see. Or rather he _could_ see; but his clear view was mixed with a wild array of secondary blurred views, surrounding the center of his vision like his field of vision had suddenly attempted to bloomed out in every direction. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes a few times to sort out his real vision from the other hazy red sights, then looked around at the dusty red-bricked buildings and the heavy red sky. "What the hell?" His voice sounded strange.

Then he looked down at his own naked body to see why he didn't feel like he was burning. "What the _hell?_ "

Black scales like charred skin, three golden stripes like gold electric wires, a dizzying array of pink-red eyes like star rubies and star rose quartz. In a daze, he lifted his left hand, blinking at it. In the middle of a gold-colored stripe around his ring finger, two tiny ruby eyes blinked back. 

He looked around, saw his hat—was that the only part of his clothing that had survived?—grabbed it, and pulled it over. A fanged one-eyed face stared at him in shock.

He stared back in equal shock. Okay. All right. That was just another thing, wasn't it. "Well," he said to it. "Where in the world are we?"

It flipped up the edges of its brim in a shrug.

"At leassst we're on the same page." His tongue felt too long; the hiss came automatically. He set his hat on his head where it belonged, discovered strange flaps dangling down where his hair should have been, identified them as a hood, and found the four eyes on them less by seeing out of them and more by accidentally repeatedly poking them.

Despite the absurd transformations, this felt _right_ , somehow. This felt natural. Claws and fangs that matched his ambitions. A tail to match the symbols he'd worn since childhood and the names he'd carried for the best half of his life. He still had his wide hips and thighs, more's the pity, transformed into a tail though they were; but as much of a flaw as he considered his hips, he supposed he _had_ always considered them an integral part of his shape, unlike the unwanted weights on his chest that had been removed to leave a perfectly smooth expanse on either side of his brooch-eye.

If _those_ were gone, then what about—?

He started furiously searching the surface of his scales around where his groin should have been.

He found what looked like a shut eye but turned out to be a slit, was disappointed; almost immediately realized the slit was shaped more like his pet python's unisex vent than like anything on a human, kept exploring it; and gasped in unmitigated delight. "There's _two!_ " What a consolation prize for waiting forty-eight years!

Another voice somewhere nearby gruffly called, "Is that _you_ , you bastard? Did we finally get you?"

Sir Pentious slammed his hat down over his groin, twisted around on his hips, and spotted a similarly naked man. The man was leaning against a wall and covering his crotch with a heavy gray-skinned hand, his head replaced by an elephant's.

Sir Pentious gaped at his head in amazement; and then an ecstatic grin crossed his face. "Ha! _Yesss!_ I _did_ get the elephant!"

"You shut up!" The elephant clapped his hands. "I can't believe we _got_ you, you son of a bitch! It's over! _You're_ over! Ha!"

Over? Was it really? Was it all over?

With a jolt of realization, Sir Pentious looked around again. Where was his son? He didn't see anyone else nearby. Did that mean he'd saved August? Or maybe it meant he'd merely been mortally wounded and wouldn't show up for another five minutes, an hour, a day, a week. Or maybe it meant that he'd gone _up_.

Sir Pentious certainly hadn't gone up.

He looked around again—was this really what "over" looked like? The end of everything? Sir Pentious tried to stand, couldn't figure out how to coordinate his tail, dragged himself on elbows and knees to a nearby pile of crumbled bricks—the elephant laughed raucously at him—and climbed it to get a better view. Brick buildings, red sky. A sky empty of airships.

A sky just _waiting_ to be filled with airships.

This didn't look like "over" to him. This looked like a morose little neighborhood with nice solid buildings just _waiting_ to be turned into a new factory.

He lowered his gaze from the sky to the ground, looking at the other nearby lost souls. Some of them had clustered together to talk. Most of them self-consciously held their hands in front of their groins. "Hey!" He cupped his hand around his mouth and yelled at the top of his longs "Hey! What are you doing jusst ssstanding around?!" That hiss was going to drive _himself_ crazy. He owed Chess an apology. He took off his hat and waved it wildly as a few people turned his direction. "Are you my people?! Are you from my factory?!"

They started waving back, some grinning, some shouting, "Boss!" "Sir Pentious!" "Hey, sir!"

"Ha! Look at this!" He smacked his hat back on his head and spread his arms wide. "A whole new world to conquer! Isn't it _gloriousss_?!" They were already converging in his direction, but he shouted anyway, " _Get over here!_ We've got evil plans to plan!" He pointed at the elephant, "And sseizzze him! He's one of the asssasssins that ssent us here!"

The elephant flinched, stumbling a step away from Sir Pentious and looking for a direction he could bolt; but Sir Pentious's followers were faster, tackling and pinning him to the ground.

Sir Pentious lifted a hand to request help; someone grabbed it, someone else the other, and between the two of them they pulled him up to roughly human height and held him up with his arms around their shoulders and their arms around his waist and clasped under his hips.

"Whatever did you do to end up down here?" Sir Pentious asked the elephant, flicking the tip of his tail tauntingly. "None of your goody-goody friendss to help you here! This is where evil little boyss and girlss end up! You're in _my_ domain." Sir Pentious looked up, beaming viciously at the blazing hellfire sky. "And I'm going to enjoy every minute I have here."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I'll add historical notes later, but I wanted particularly to add one piece of art: in the RadioSnake discord I'd discussed my headcanon that Sir Pentious had a self-destruct device he intended to use to preemptively cremate himself if he ever thought he was going to be captured/killed so he couldn't be exposed as trans during incarceration/autopsy; one member of the discord took that idea and went and created [a combination binder/packer/corset/self-destruct device](https://snakes-and-radios.tumblr.com/post/625123590801686528/this-is-a-device-i-designed-meant-for-sir) that I used as the basic idea for the device Sir Pent wore in this fic.
> 
> Also it's important to me that you know we saw that gunpowder packer and made "packing heat" jokes for like ten minutes.
> 
> THAT'S IT, that's the fic! Links for this chapter on [tumblr](https://ckret2.tumblr.com/post/625312297078964224/basilisk-in-the-grass-chapter-4-ckret2) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/ckret2/status/1289787970237521923?s=20)! If you enjoyed, comments would be DEEPLY appreciated! And I guess tomorrow I'm catching up on the last two days of Pentious Week, because the day after that is the start of _Alastor Week_! Stay tuned!!


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